I can make it.

We had guests for the Labor Day weekend.  My brother Perry and his wife, Toni.  Our son Charlie.  Our nephew Paul.

Hurricane Isaac impacted our plans Friday with a rain out of the Twins game.  I tried and failed to give the tickets away but we ended up using them Sunday in the scorching, searing Missouri heat.  And of course, the Twins lost.  We came home from the K ready for a fine meal and more family time.

The title of this post refers to a "kitchen incident" that occurred Sunday night as I was preparing dinner for my guests.  The menu?  BBQ country-style ribs in the pressure cooker, cole slaw and beans.  Followed by Perry's delicious zucchini cake.

Ribs cooked this way are fall-off-the-bone tender so I was confident that I would be receiving accolades for hours after dinner.  Except for the stupid move I made with a sharp knife.

Quick rewind.  For Mother's Day, John and Charlie bought me some REALLY sharp knives.  I don't even like to put them in the dishwasher, so as not to dull the edges.  I love those knives.  And there's a bunch of 'em.  There's a paring knife, a chef's knife, six steak knives, a bread knife, a boning knife.  A fabulous pair of kitchen scissors that will cut through anything.  Even a tomato knife.

But it was the utility knife that did me in.

Five minutes before the ribs should leave the flame, I was attempting to open a jar of slaw dressing with the utility knife.

The blade slipped and I stabbed myself right in that fleshy part of the hand between the thumb and index finger.

I yelled.

Not in a panic, mind you.  More at myself.

I went to the sink and turned on the water, to wash the wound a bit.

Then blood started spurting from the hole in my hand and I really yelled.  Loud.

"I cut myself!"

Medic!  (My brother was in the National Guard and my nephew is active duty.)

Both sprang to action.

"Put pressure on it," my brother ordered and despite my morbid desire to see the blood blurting out and the fact that he's seventeen years younger than I am, I obeyed.  Paul was right there with the bandage.

It's not a big cut...just about a quarter of an inch.  But it is deep and it hurt like hell.

Pressure and a bandage was exactly what I needed.  That and for my brother to finish cooking dinner while I supervised, telling him what to do and when.

Just what I needed.

When the news hits too close to home

Wednesday morning was one just like most others.  Wake up, turn on the morning news, make coffee, read the newspaper.  Our morning team was dealing with breaking news that day.  A wrong-way crash hurt three people.  I-435 had been closed for hours and was still closed at 6am.  Bummer for commuters.

That afternoon, I was on a conference call and idly clicked on to my Facebook page.  A message?  How fun!  I clicked it.

"The girls in the wrong way crash are Ken and Diane's daughters," my cousin messaged.  "They are headed to KC right now."

Ken (Kendall) Wiechmann is my cousin.  Our grandfathers were brothers so we aren't first cousins. Second?  Third?  Whatever.  We went to school together, starting in the one-room school house through 12th Grade.  We had the same last name so we walked one after the other at graduation in May, 1975.  I went off to college and he started his own career.  We hadn't seen each other in years.

When we were children, Kendall was always just a little bigger and a little stronger than I was.  We had a typical "cousins" relationship.  Our farms were a mile apart.  He had a sister who was Pam's age and a brother who was Paula's age.  We played together.  We swam in the creek together.  We poured water down gopher holes together.

"You're ugly," I would say to him.

"You're dumb," he would counter.

And we would throw dirt clods at each other.  (A common childhood  activity in South Dakota.  Dirt clods look like rocks but aren't as dense and turn into dust upon contact.)

Back to Wednesday afternoon.  I was frozen.  I raced to the assignment desk where Killer pulled the accident report. KrissaMarie (age 22) and Kayla Wiechmann (age 26), both of Nashville (formerly of South Dakota), were driving home to see their family.

Rory Liberty, a guy with a relatively clean record, apparently driving under the influence, crashed into their car.

I didn't know these girls but my heart ached for their worried parents.  Thursday I waited for the driver to be charged so I could tell their parents.  I looked at the girls' pictures on Facebook and wondered at their lives.

Another cousin told me about the driver who was right behind them when they collided with Rory Liberty's car.  He put out the fire that started and stayed with them until the ambulances came.

That truck mechanic saved them from further injury and possibly worse.

My family is grateful to Richard Jewell.