Cooter purchased an older house. There were a long list of projects, mostly repairs and some improvements, which included doors, windows, deck, finish basement, and on and on.

There were only two cable TV outlets in the walls, living room and family room. As the months went wore on Cooter’s kids, Soot and Creek asked for TV’s in their rooms. Cooter, anticipating this was going to be a done deal, purchased the necessary cable, wall outlets, and plates to install the cable outlets in their rooms. To do so, he had to drop and pull cable lines through the attic and down the inside the walls of bedrooms.

He started the install on Saturday. Cooter pulled down the ceiling steps on the second floor hallway ceiling and climbed up into the attic with a collection of hand and power tools to begin the cable job. Accessing the walls studs from the attic went fairly well in most rooms, except for one. There is always one! To access the wall studs in the “one” he had to crawl into the attic area on all fours as the pitch of the roof narrowed to meet the attic flooring. With some difficulty and time he was successful in locating the wall joists, drilling the holes and dropping the cable line.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to Cooter, his 5 year old Soot, had climbed up the attic drop-down stairs and quietly situated himself on a storage box to the watch his dad work. Cooter finished the last room, was crawling backwards out of the narrow work space and in the process of raising his head ran a protruding roofing nail into his skull. Cooter in excruciating pain, called on his full vocab, loudly expressing how pissed he was for not remembering roofing nails protrude through the roofing plywood.

Soot, sitting on the storage box adjacent to his dad, could clearly hear the extended, continuing string of foul language. It was Cooter’s best effort. It included body parts, lewd acts, and religious references. Soot in response, loudly called out, “Really nice language, Dad!”

There is no moral to this entry. If the kids don’t learn it from the old man, the kids are fully language capable, thanks to their peers, by the time they reach first grade. In the case of Cooter’s kids, they learned it on the school bus.

***** S&E ****