CAUTION: Gasoline fumes may be hazardous

My tinkering with the snowblower Sunday may have done more harm the good.

Kris went to bed around 10 p.m. last night. I stayed up for another couple of hours, catching up on the latest episode of “Enterprise” that I taped over the weekend and reading my new book. I went to bed around midnight.

I remember being aware of Kris getting out of bed and assuming it must be 5:30 a.m. and she’s getting up to go for her run. I was too tired to actually roll over and look at the clock. However, the next thing I know, I hear Chester running up the stairs and he jumped up onto our bed (usually he would be sound asleep on his chair in our room – why was he downstairs?). Kris came in behind him and climbed into bed too. Was she skipping her run today?

Only then did I realize that it was only 1:30 a.m. I had only been in bed for a little more than an hour.

It seems Chester was acting funny. So Kris got up to let him out. He was still acting strange. So for some reason I figured I’d try taking him out myself to see what he does. All he did was try to eat grass – which always makes him sick. So I made him come back in.

Soon we figured out what may have been making him act weird. When I climbed back into bed, I realized that our room reeked of gasoline. In my delirious state, I thought it might all be in my head until Kris mentioned it too (our bedroom is right above the garage).

Our snowblower usually smells of gas after I use it. I usually have to leave the garage door open for a while to let it air out. I went down and checked the garage and sure enough, the gas smell would almost knock you over. I checked the snowblower and it was leaking – sitting in a big puddle of gasoline. I figured I’d fix it in the morning and tried to go back to bed.

But Kris was very worried about it (and rightly so – I was just too tired to think straight). So I went back downstairs and moved the snowblower outside. When I came in, Kris was preparing to sleep downstairs. She asked me if I cleaned up the puddle, which of course I hadn’t. So I trudged back into the garage, opened the door back up and started hosing the spot off. Then I mopped it up with some rags and tossed them outside with the snowblower.

When I came back in, Kris had gone back upstairs. She decided that with my going in and out, the downstairs now smelled worse. I climbed back into bed, and she said now she was worried about the snowblower leaking a puddle of gas on the driveway. I insisted that was no big deal and convinced her of such.

However, now I couldn’t get back to sleep (it was about 2 a.m. at this point). Despite my instance that it was no big deal, I went back downstairs – again – to go outside with a flashlight and try to stop the damn snowblower from leaking gas.

I stopped the leak, went back upstairs, crawled into bed…and then was informed that my clothes smelled. So I had to get back up again and change my clothes.

Finally, sometime after 2 a.m., I was able to get to sleep. Could a Monday get off to a worse start?