My head versus the wall

I had just come back from visiting my oldest daughter at college. Since she will be done for the year shortly, I offer to haul some of her stuff back home today. One of these items is a large, heavy, metal foot-locker packed with shoes, winter jackets, make-up, whatever young ladies pack that tends to weigh a ton. So, … I am hauling this beast upstairs, both hands grabbing the handles on the end. I stagger up the first flight, “Okay, take a deep breath”, and proceed up the second flight a little faster. I start to lose my balance a bit as momentum takes over, so I speed up.

Almost there!

I trip on the final step.

I am now careening a short distance to the newly painted upstairs landing wall. Time slows down.
I do not want the metal foot-locker to come into contact with the wall that I had spent a weekend painting, so I quickly lower the front end towards the floor and attempt to twist my body to hit the wall with my shoulder.
I manage to accomplish task number one, but fail to get my shoulder in place as the wall zooms in on me, so I brace for impact with the top of my head.

THUNK!!!

Damn! That didn’t really hurt, but it smashed my hat!
Wait a minute, I’m not wearing a hat!

I had managed to embed my head into the drywall up to my eyebrows! The unfortunate part of all this, besides the future drywall repair work I must now do, is that both my younger daughters witnessed this … but no one recorded it to put on America’s Funniest Home Videos!

You have to watch out for walls, they’ll sneak up on you. They’re real stealthy bastards.

Heck, it’s not just walls. Trees, curbs, mailboxes, I’ve had just about every inanimate object that would win in a momentum contest appear directly in front of me after it was too late to change course.

My owie head has sympathy for your owie head.

Mine got owie when I was painting today. I set the paint can down on the hearth, bent down to dip my brush, and stood up and smacked my noggin on the underside of the stone mantel.

The mantel, unlike the drywall, did not give way.

Yayyy!
Head: 1 Wall: 0

That’ll learn 'em! Those tricksy walls.

Better to be hard-headed than hard-hearted.

Or something like that.

Owie, indeed.

I have a scar below my left eye from the time an evil car door decided to challenge my face, but walls generally leave me alone.

Floors, now…