Monday, January 3, 2011

It's Official

It's official. On day three of the new year, I have managed to incur my first injury.

A personal note to my teaching buddy, Mabel: you may want to make sure you are sitting down, ready to put your head between your knees, with fresh smelling-salts at the ready. Some leakage of the red body fluid is involved.

Mabel is OK with extra fluids being added to the body, like with a shot or an IV. But not so much with regular body fluids being siphoned away by means fair or foul. At least it isn't her very own red body fluid escaping the confines of her very own skin.

The boys and I made a trip around the county today. The Pony and I got haircuts, we paid the Mansion payment and fed two savings accounts, picked up lunch, dropped off some items to my mom, and hoofed it back to Hillmomba.

The Pony was the first out of T-Hoe. He is the keymaster, and gets the door unlocked for us. Also a useful beast of burden, The Pony carries in one load of junk, and comes back to the garage for more. The #1 son usually requires prodding and poking to wake up and move his nap into the Mansion. I grabbed my purse and my soda, just the essentials, really, as #1 was rummaging around for assorted detritus that he had packed for the two-and-a-half-hour tour.

I suppose it goes without saying that Architect H modified our Mansion plans and flipped the angle of the garage, and custom-sized it. Which means that we have a garage that just barely accommodates T-Hoe, and either the Pacifica or the $1000 Caravan (upon which Short-Sighted H just mounted $282 worth of studded snow tires). Pardon me. There is just something inherently wrong with spending over 25% of your car's value on tires that will be used for three months of the year. It's not like we're living in Sarah Palin's Alaska.

Upon exiting T-Hoe, soda in hand, purse on my arm, I stepped back to have room to close the driver's door. Then I proceeded to walk between T-Hoe and the garage wall to get out the door to leading to the porch and Mansion. I turned my head to make sure that #1 was getting out of T-Hoe. And it happened.

I snagged my left forearm on a nail that jutted approximately two inches out of a 2 x 4 stud on the garage wall. It was one of 18 such nails protruding from the inner wall, nails which act as hanging racks for an assortment of fishing poles. I suppose I'm fortunate that my flesh did not catch a fish hook. Thank the Gummi Mary that we don't live in Sarah Palin's Alaska.

Upon hearing my scream of horror, #1 glanced and looked away. In fact, he ran away, in a walking manner, to the driveway to look at the Christmas decorations that he was supposed to dismantle. The Pony returned for his extra load, saw the blood bubbling from my arm, and gasped in sympathy. "I'll go get you a band-aid!" #1 shouted at him to help with the undecorating, but I excused Pony momentarily.

The wound is on the opposite arm from the scar I garnered by ripping my tender ten-year-old epidermis on a barbed-wire fence while trying to pet a stranger's pony off the bank of a creek in my childhood neighborhood. It is south of the fingertip where I plunged a razor blade 5 mm deep while trying to saw the foreleg off a plastic horse when I was eleven. Don't ask. It is further south of a scar at the base of my thumb left by a small paring knife after a cassette-tape-package-removal incident on the parking lot of Battlefield Mall during my college years, a wound which illustrated what my anatomy books had been showing me about how cartilage is smooth and white, while fat is yellow and lumpy. The new gouge is north of the scar formed from road rash after I totaled my Chevy Chevette after my first year of teaching, carelessly flopping my arm out the open window to scrape the blacktop of Missouri Highway 8 on the first of three rolls of that little tin car before it landed driver's door down in a ditch.

The gaping hole in my left forearm is the size of a nail head. The flesh is gouged out and hangs beside the bubbling cavity. My nerves have not been damaged, as I feel pain upon placing the injury under cool, running water. A dab of triple antibiotic ointment and a band-aid later, I no longer leave a trail that can be followed by one of those Twilight freaks.

I'm hoping my tetanus shot was in the last ten years. You know, the tetanus shot I had to leave school to get on a Monday morning after I was bitten by a chipmunk on a Sunday afternoon. I'm sure I told that story once upon a time between now and 2005 when I started my first blog. I'm thinking the chipmunk attack was in 2000 or 2001, because we had already moved our high school into Newmentia, but it was in the carefree days before 9/11, and it was during football season.

As long as I learn how to shoot a bear, I'm thinking that Sarah Palin's Alaska might be safer than Hillmomba.

8 comments:

Jennifer said...

I was brave and kept reading even with the VIVID details of blood gushing!

I am like your friend Mabel in that regard.

Sounds like good times at your place today...while everyone on this side of the state had to return to SCHOOL today. *sigh*.

Oh wait.. what am I saying?? I didn't have to.. ha. but I am sure tomorrow the sub calls will start up again hot and heavy.

Hillbilly Mom said...

Jennifer,
We return to school on Wednesday. Several years ago we put some forceful faculty on the calendar committee, and they swing us a 2-week Christmas vacation every year. Of course, that sometimes means starting school around August 11, but by Christmas time, we've forgotten the early start.

knancy said...

Tell me, did you maintain the integrity of the Sonic Route 44 Diet Coke With Lime during this bloody blooper?

Hillbilly Mom said...

knancy,
Actually, the Truth in Blogging Law requires me to inform you that it was a Captain D's Diet Pepsi. That's because the #1 son wanted to go there for lunch, and I picked up a Baked Tilapia for Health Food H's supper, and a soda came with it, and they don't serve Coke, and after so many stops, I didn't want to go by Sonic.

But I DID save the soda, to which I added the juice of a lime from The Devil's Playground lime stash that I keep in Frig, my Frigidaire, along with a can of Diet Coke with Lime. And it tasted just like you might imagine, and tomorrow I will be T-Hoeing it to Sonic.

Even if I have to steer with one arm.

Mommy Needs a Xanax said...

You got bitten by a chipmunk and all you got was a tetanus shot? Nobody thought rabies shots might be more appropriate?

BTW I found this today and thought of you. Missouri is #1!!!

http://www.forensic-applications.com/meth/methlab.jpg

Hillbilly Mom said...

Mommy Ann,
In fact, I sought the nurse specifically to ask about rabies and chipmunks. She was no help on that topic, but declared that I was definitely in need of a tetanus booster. Hmpf! As if that little critter had slashed me with a rusty nail!

The county health center also pled ignorance on the diseases carried by chipmunks. I would have been in better hands if I had been bitten by a bear in Sarah Palin's Alaska.

Your meth lab data is not surprising. It seems like only yesterday that the road to Hillmomba was blocked by law enforcement officials gathering up the detritus from a hastily-discarded traveling meth lab.

They're quite mobile around these parts. Like traveling ice cream trucks, or food wagons. No need to go in search of meth. It will come to you.

I trust that your fine state of Mississippi still leads us in teen pregnancies and fat people?

Mommy Needs a Xanax said...

I believe so, yes. No signs of us losing ground on those proud statistics anytime soon, either. Now hush and pass the cake, says the pregnant lady.

Hillbilly Mom said...

Mommy Ann,
I would love to pass the cake, but The Pony ate the last of the Christmas Oreo Cake when he saw me carrying it to the porch to feed the chickens on Saturday.

The sugar-free chocolate cake with sugar-free chocolate icing that I made for Diabetic H was growing a spot of mold this morning, so it was flung off the back porch.

Apparently, cakes are ticking time bombs of spoilage, and must be closely monitored lest a frugal woman such as my mother, she of the former Fat Red Pinky Finger, try to get their Depression-era money's worth out of them and save them until the next holiday.