the glass is half-full.....

I didn't make it to my meeting after work yesterday. I was sitting at my desk, cleaning out my in-box, when the phone rang. The caller ID indicated that it was my bride. I picked up the phone, and knew immediately that something was wrong. Her voice was shaky. "I just about burned the house down....." After asking if she was alright, I packed up and headed home.

The bride had taken Meg to a doctor's appointment. While in the waiting room, she remembered that she had put a pot of black eyed peas or purple hull peas (some sort of nasty vegetable) on the stove a few minutes before leaving the house. About 10 minutes into the appointment, she realized that she forgot to turn the stove off. Driving "like a maniac" across Franklin, she arrived home and smelled smoke. Luckily, there was no fire to accompany the smoke.....just alot of smoke.

About five minutes into my commute home, the bride called and said she was doing better. I kept thinking about a friend of mine who had been through a similar situation recently. I can't remember all the details, but I believe it was a grease fire. On his way home, he actually heard about the "house fire" during the traffic report on a local radio station. Talk about scary! They ended up having to have a fire restoration team come into their home and do some major work. They even had to move out for a week, staying in an extended-stay hotel - with 2 children under 5. Whee!

There was no real damage done to the house. The smell of smoke lingers heavily, almost a cross between cigar smoke and burned microwave popcorn.

I'm not always a "the glass is half-full" kind of person. I guess it's my contingent-thinking mind, always playing out different scenarios, both good and bad, when things occur. I do it at work all the time, and sometimes it bleeds over into my personal life. But here's why the glass is half-full:

1. No one was hurt. We're still a family of four, and no one came away with any injuries.
2. The house is still intact. Stinky, but still intact.
3. The bride wasn't injured while driving home. Turns out she may have a career in NASCAR.

In closing, please keep Mom in your prayers. We found out today that she's having an ultrasound done in the morning. During a doctor's visit last week because of some abdominal pain, a cat scan revealed a small, low-density cyst in her liver. Tomorrow's ultrasound will give them a better look at the situation. She's pretty calm about it. I asked if the ultrasound was actually needed because she and dad were about to give me a baby brother, and she promised me that wasn't the case at all. Whew.......