Every house has its story. What's yours?

Life is full of surprising and intellectually stimulating interludes, particularly when one's household is equipped with offspring of an adventurous and inquisitive nature. One of the offspring contingent of this particular household presented me with an interlude of that sort mere minutes ago by accidentally drawing a thick blue line in permanent marker smack dab in the middle of the kitchen floor--a nice absorbent oak surface.

My wife, the Viking descendent, threw in the towel immediately after taking a few desultory swipes at the blot with some window cleaner.

"Fine, so we'll have a blue line on the kitchen floor for the rest of our lives," she exclaimed somewhat peevishly and stomped off to the shower."

Not so, I thought, for I believe I may have a solution.

The solution I had was, in fact, a solution. Known as lacknafta in these here parts, it's a petroleum distillate that I believe is functionally equivalent to turpentine, so the English word for the substance isn't particularly important. It might be called "white spirit".

Suffice it to say, about 15-20 minutes of assiduous scrubbing with a paper towel soaked in the lacknafta stuff reduced the striking blue stroke to a mere ghost of its former self. The line did not disappear completely, but did fade to the point at which one now has to look very carefully to identify the location of the tragedy. In another week or two, the tragedy will be nothing but a memory.

And as far as I can tell, the hardwood floor and its lacquered coating suffered no permanent damage from the incident. I assume the lacknafta also removed some of the lacquer, but nothing visible. Perhaps that patch will wear slightly more rapidly than the rest of the floor, but with two kids and a large dog scampering around the house, our floors are doomed anyway. At night, they whimper.