Btw, our son is called lee as well. He's 40 next month.
Russ
Our Lee is 63, and still hard to keep up with.
Here's a classic Lee story, I'll call it The Last Fireworks Show.
Now, I'm not sure what kind of fireworks you can buy in NZ, or the UK, or other parts of the world, but around here, you can can good fireworks, ones that'll nearly rival some of the professional shows, for cheap. Every year for his fireworks show, Lee would pass the hat, collect a few hundred bucks, and go buy all the doo-dads.
In addition to the usual rockets and screamers and bursts, he always bought a few "finale specials" - these were multi-charged fireworks...one canister about the size of an office rubbish bin -just light the fuse and stand back, and for the next several minutes, it would spew a multitude of blasts. We always saved those for the end.
Well, this particular night, I was running the show, lighting all the rockets and all that, with Lee's "help" - meaning he'd drunkenly stagger down the little path out to the top of the field where I had everything set up, tell me I was doing a great job, light off something, then wander back down the path to the spectators area.
We got to the end, I loudly announced the finale was starting, and lit the first of four finale specials.
Sssssssssss...nothing. It petered out. I looked with my flashlight, and the fuse had burned up into the canister, so I just let it be and moved on to the next one.
About that time...here comes Lee.
"Hey, man, what, I say, what happened with that first one, man?"
"Never went off, and the fuse is gone, probably a dud."
"Well, that @#%ing sucks, man!"
"Don't worry about it, we have three others. Just leave that one alone and you can take it back and get some money back for it being a dud."
"Yeah, but I wanted it tonight, man! That just sucks!"
At that point, he started tapping it with his boot, and then he tried to light several matches to cram up the fuse hole.
"Hey, just leave it alone! You're gonna screw around and catch yourself on fire! Again!"
"Aw, shut up-"
By now, he'd put his head directly over the giant canister, just inches from the opening.
"-I'm just checking to-"
BOOM!
Yep, it went off, and him with his fat noggin directly over it.
He whirled backward, and I'll never forget for the rest of my life what he said next:
"AHHHHHHHH! I'M BLIND! I CAN'T SEE! DID I SAY I CAN'T SEE? 'CAUSE I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M SAYING 'CAUSE I CAN'T HEAR, EITHER! AHHHHHH!"
I ran over to him, and I kid you not, he looked just like Elmer Fudd used to look in those old cartoons where he looked down the shotgun and got his head blown off.
Shining my light on him, his face was completely black from the powder going off. What little hair he had was blown back. His whole entire head was smoking!
He kept screaming he couldn't see, he couldn't hear, oh God, he was dying, he loved everybody and was going to miss them and please somebody take care of his dogs and all that, and about that time, his wife showed up.
Now, his wife was an O/R nurse. She'd seen it all in her time. She showed up and immediately took command. She grabbed my brother by the shoulders and shouted, "Lee! Lee! Do you require medical attention, Lee?! Do you require medical attention?! Lee! Lee!"
For some reason, the way she asked that question, it sounded so ridiculously...official, I just burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. I looked over at her, and she was snapping her fingers in his ears and holding her lighter up to his eyes, back and forth, and she just kept repeating, "Do you require medical attention, Lee?! Lee! Lee!" - all the while, on top of that, he's moaning about somebody taking care of his dogs, and he willed me his 1970 Triumph motorcycle, and he started naming other things he was bequeathing to whomever was nearby, it was surrealist dark comedy at its best.
Of course, the end of the story is that he was fine, his eyesight came right back, took a couple of hours for his ears to clear up, and he immediately took back all the stuff he'd given us, and his wife announced then and there, NO MORE FIREWORKS OR BONFIRES FOR LEE!
), she made him stop, because every year, he'd get liquored up and fall into the bonfire ("Stop drop and roll, Lee! Stop drop and roll!), catch one of his outbuildings on fire, or set the woods on fire. 
