Things That Shatter in the Night

When I registered for the not so fragile drinking glasses as a wedding gift I was thinking of my ever so clumsy husband and expecting them to last about a year, rather than the six or so months the cheaper sets seemed to limit us to. And you can imagine my surprise when they lasted not only our first year, but also our second, and now three and a half years later, we were standing strong with ten of the original twelve glasses. Truly an amazing record for us.

But last night it wasn't my husband who broke the third glass, taking us down to nine. It was me. And it was the first time that choosing the more solid, not frail, set of glasses backfired on me.

It was one o'clock in the morning and I was half-asleep when I dropped my fleshly dispensed glass of ice water on the kitchen floor, sending cold water and ice in all directions. Shards of glass were sent flying through the darkness (because who needs a light when you've made this same trip a thousand times), and I was surprised to walk away without atleast a minor cut. But while trying to clean up the mess I found that the sturdy glass had severely chipped two of the brick red floor tiles. By chipped I mean good-sized, obvious chunks of red ceramic were missing, leaving behind several white craters, which would not have been so annoying if they hadn't been centered in the room. Multiple speckles of white, right smack in the middle of all that deep reddish brown. It looked like I did not own, or could not operate, a broom.

I went back to bed with fears of new flooring, or having to bring in a professional to repair the two tiles. I tossed and turned through nightmares of Home Depot and new grout that didn't match the old grout. When I woke up this morning I had to double check, just to make sure it wasn't all a bad dream. Unfortunately it wasn't a dream. My floor still looked like I snacked on a sugared donut the night before and didn't bother to clean up after myself.

Jon and I stopped in at both Home Depot and Lowe's tonight where we discovered that, like most tiles over a year old, our tile has been discontinued. I'm still checking a few places around the house to see if perhaps the previous homeowners stashed any of the leftover tiles somewhere. In the meantime I came up with a much more temporary solution. I pulled out a large box of colored pencils, sat myself down on the floor, and colored my little heart out. I found the perfect color combination between three different pencils, and surprisingly, even I have a hard time finding the destruction from a short distance. But like I said, the pencils are definitely temporary. If I can't find something better, I may be putting in a call to my mother-in-law, the artist, and ask her to work her color magic, and hide my hideous spots.