grass stains: I could've died in my basement

Grayson and Nathaniel were out of town on a Boy Scout trip over the weekend, so I spent about 10 hours in the basement trying to whip it into shape in preparation for moving our couch down there next weekend.

We recently bought a new one for the den, and we're hoping to move Big Brown downstairs when the new one's delivered ... but in order for that to happen, a LOT of changes needed to occur in the basement first.

This picture is several years old, but here's where the shelves were when I started:

They were wrapped all the way around the room. So I started dragging them all over the place (after partially unloading them), putting two of them inside the closet you see to the left, then three more to the far right, and the others on different walls.

At any rate, I'll be showing you "After" pictures in a few weeks. That's not what this post is about.

This post is about what happened to me in the middle. Around about this point:

Clearly, you can see that I was OUTSIDE OF MY MIND when I decided to do this by myself. But that's neither here nor there.

The horse had already left the barn or whatever, and I was bound and determined to finish. I just kept being thwarted by the many unexpected (and, okay, some expected) obstacles in my path.

There are a lot of weights down there. And for whatever reason, they "need" to be all spread out. Can't all be in one spot, you know. So I kept lugging them over to the weight bench and dropping them off over there.

Everything from the five-pounders ...

To this mother, which must have weighed over 80 pounds when you counted both weights AND the bar. My right shin now bears two bruises in the exact shape of the outer edge of that cuss.

And does everyone have one of these that they're holding on to? I thought so. Good.

But what ended up causing me the MOST grief of the weekend, quite ironically, came from the top of one of the bookshelves. See, the shelves are home to a lot of unidentified stuff. Stuff I both don't WANT to and am not "supposed" to touch. (I'm not supposed to touch it because of the likelihood that if I did, I'd decide to throw it away.) (So I don't, because I know myself well enough to feel as though that would be true.) (But COME ON! Look at that!)

As I dragged the shelves to their new spots, I was careful not to dislodge anything I'd left on them.

I was successful, until the last one. And please, don't ask me about the clown. I DON'T KNOW, EITHER. I avoid that thing at all costs.

So I was moving that shelf, and I heard something, maybe, rolling? And I had a split second to think, "Uh oh," before silence, and then BOOM. It narrowly missed my head, nailed my shoulder, rolled down my arm and hit the floor. I looked down and saw a grenade.

ACA-SCUSE ME?

That's right, you heard me.

A GRENADE.