"Yet who would have thought the old man/ to have had so much blood in him."

[muninnhuginn]

Well, the lesson is, never go out and leave the kids with dangerous toys.

The learning was going out to talk to LL's teacher leaving M in charge of LL, a bubbling casserole, in the garden, in the dark, making modifications to our bike so as to fit a tagalong bracket. It really was dark, so the assumption on our part was that he'd give up and come inside when I left so as better to supervise kid and cooking. We got back in time to allow him to drive to A&E (hell, we've just thought: he's not allowed to drive and he got the car home somehow. Better not to go there.) with a severely chiseled finger. It's stitched, bandaged, and he's not meant to drive until Monday--bit of a problem for getting to and from Novacon.

We repeat: never leave children unattended near dangerous tools.

We finished off his clearing up in the kitchen last night: it's not possible to cook with human blood stains on the units.

This morning we've done the same to the bathroom (except the carpet: we're buggered if we're doing all the clearing up). Blood really get everywhere. M has no ability to look carefully. We've cleaned the spots and smears from the living room floor too. Bloodied T-shirts, even if they've sentimental value, will be binned.

So, we're all probably stuck for the weekend. The ravens are also stuck, with a half-"fixed" bike, for getting out to out RPG session--and with a lingering feeling that this was going to happen all along. We need to fit a bracket for a tagalong bike for LL. The standard way to do this seems to be to fit a clamp around the pillar of the towing bike's saddle. With a clamp of about 2 inches high, this means the bike seat must be at least 2" above the minimum. Fine if you're tall enough. We're not. A bare 1/2" is our absolute safe maximum. M said he'd take off the saddle's clamp and fix the tagalong clamp in its place as a dual purpose attachment for tagalong and clamp for saddle. We wanted to get someone else to do this, so that it wouldn't go wrong and if it did there'd be someone to get to fix it. Either that or buy a smaller bike (a teenager's one). It's not that we have no confidence in M: we know for certain he can't see straight, cut straight or do anything other than a bodged job. We also knew that it would be done in such a way and at such a time that we'd be left without a bike.

Feeling vindicated doesn't makes us any less pissed off by it all.