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.