People Getting Hurt**

Do you know me? If you know me, I don't have to tell you that I am accident prone. Once I was standing in the office I shared with Bobby Sherman back in the public defender days when I went to lean against it and fell squarely on my ass. Bobby later said I looked exactly like a cartoon character. Another time, I was talking on a pay phone while sitting on a rolling stool when it flew out from under me and I hit my head and back on the cement floor, causing months of severe back pain. And of course, there are the ankle sprains: from jumping up and down in sand at the park; from tripping over a tennis ball; from trying to hop over a planter with flowers in a parking lot. Then there are the numerous times I'm crashed head-first into swimming pool walls, walked into doors, fallen down stairs. I even fell up stairs once. (It is possible. Imagine it is dark and you think there's one more step, but there's really not.)

For someone so accident prone, I have a perverse streak in me that is drawn to danger. It's not that I actually like it, per se, but I'm strangely fascinated by it.

For instance, I have idly been eyeing power washers for the past year or so. It started with the shop vac, which as I've written about before, is easy to become obsessed with. It's so satisfying and you really don't know where to stop. I imagined that power washing my sidewalks and the stucco sides of the house would be much the same way.

I was manning an early morning booth at a crafts fair with fellow members of the Children's Hospital Auxiliary when some of the husbands stopped by. They were watching the kids. They brought a box of doughnuts and coffee and mentioned that after their triathlon training run they would be power washing all of their backyard hardscapes (I was too mystified by these Stepford Husbands to be jealous.)

Power washer, huh? A few days later, coincidentally, I heard a snippet on the radio about power washers. "Of course, they are very dangerous," the man said. That grabbed me. "Of course?" "Very dangerous?" I couldn't imagine how, or why. I pictured the scene from the Steve Martin movie Roxanne where the guys are training to be firemen and the big hose is whipping around out of control. Or maybe it's just that the ground gets really slippery and you (me!) might fall.

I'd kind of wanted one before, but upon hearing that they are actually very dangerous, now I really needed one.

Don't tell Grandma (who hates and openly harrasses water-wasters), but I've started hosing off our sidewalks. Until I owned a house of my own, I never could understand why people did that. How stupid can you be? Why don't you just sweep? Why are they out there watering cement? It's not like it grows, like grass or plants.

But now that we live in a dusty town with daily winds and have a yard full of prolific fruit trees, plus kids who spill juice and macaroni and cheese and cats who spit up hairballs on top of popsicle spills and sidewalk chalk art, I understand. So that's how they get their front yards looking so nice. But hosing it off with a regular volume hose just isn't enough. I need a power washer to get the really stubborn, stuck-on sticky stuff.

But the danger...or because of the danger...I just wasn't sure.

I was mulling all of this over on the morning of our big Labor Day block party. I was actually thinking, "I wonder whether I could use the power washer on this table?" as I moved our patio furniture from the front yard into the front driveway. Scott helped me move the round glass topper, and I rolled it from the back to the front. I set it down (very, very carefully) and began the set-up. It was quiet, peaceful, cool.

As I brushed the glass ever so slightly against the metal frame of the table, a deafening sound not unlike a gunshot tore through our neighborhood. My first thought was, This table was SO expensive! My second thought was, I'm so glad I did my hair and put on makeup, so I'll look halfway decent at the emergency room.

Tempered glass explodes violently into thousands of squarish balls. They aren't really sharp, but dozens of them were stuck to me, to my skin, my hair, my clothes. They weren't embedded through cuts, but rather, were stuck on by the sheer force of the explosion. Glass had flown in every direction, though not up (thank God; I wouldn't have wanted any of this to have flown forcefully into my eyes), but out. Sixty pounds of glass was now strewn in three odd low arc-ing patterns across our entire driveway and yard.

In a daze, I went inside the house. "Well, the table is broken," I announced to Scott. He was at the stove, making eggs for the girls. He seemed unfazed. We have been married almost ten years so he's quite used to me by now.

In the bathroom, I put Barbie bandaids (the only selection available) on my cuts, which were strangely superficial given the violence of the explosion. I still couldn't quite believe what had just happened. I was heading upstairs to lie down when P___, my neighbor, knocked on the door. "Are you okay??!!" She had a dustpan in her hand. "R__ and S__ are in the driveway with brooms. Pull the trash can around."

Bless their hearts, they helped clean up the entire thing. R__ manned the shop vac. Have I mentioned how much I love my shop vac? We noticed a lot of glass in the grass, on both sides of the driveway. R__ got the big pieces, and later I vacuumed up more. And more. That's the thing about a shop vac. Where does the dirt end and the world begin? When you are vacuuming up leaves and twigs, with the random shard of tabletop, how do you know when you're done?

Back in the house, after lying down with a Miss Marple mystery for half an hour, I felt better. "That was the scariest thing that ever happened to me in my entire life," I told Scott.

"In your entire life?" he asked, ever skeptical.

He knows me too well. I am accident prone, and prone to exaggeration. And he knows our anniversary is coming up. Ten is a big one. Maybe big enough for a power washer? We'll see if our hearts can take it.

** You can find just about anything on google. Want to know what I'm thinking about today? Try a search for "water heater explosion," "power washer dangerous," and "tempered glass explosion." Welcome to my little corner of the world.