In which I almost died but I didn’t so it’s funny instead

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The shower in our bathroom is a two-piece affair, with an overhead rainwater-style showerhead and a second handheld one that’s mounted on a grab bar and fully adjustable. I generally keep both running for the entire time I’m showering, and the handheld gets used as a handheld quite a bit as well, because I am a fat man and as a fat man I have nooks and crannies and such a thing makes the whole hygiene process a lot more complete. There’s also a bench in the shower, which technically was put in there to be sat on but which I mostly use as a way to make my feet and legs easier to wash.

Well, today I was finishing that process up and managed to somehow drop the wand, and a lot of things went wrong very quickly. The first thing I did was to look straight down, as one might expect from someone who had just dropped something. Unfortunately, and I don’t think I could have done this again if my life depended on it, I managed to drop the thing in such a way that it landed pointing directly up. Which means that, while balancing semi-precariously on one foot, I dropped the shower head, started a little bit at the loud noise when it hit the tile floor, had time to think oh, shit, I hope I didn’t break anything, then looked down, to be surprised by a rather intense blast of water coming up from the floor and directly into my face.

Telling this story, I feel like it shouldn’t have surprised me to get water in my face while showering, but the direction was unexpected, y’know? You don’t expect the floor to spray you when you’re showering, unless you’re in a much more complicated shower than I was in.

And my surprised reaction to that led directly to being flat on my ass in the shower a second or two later, wondering what the hell had just happened. I then, in rapid succession, went from ow to did I break anything to did I break part of the shower to it would be super to explain what had happened if I’d landed on the shower head, because no one would ever believe that story, ever.

And that led to a mental apology to my wife, because if I had managed to break a bone on the way down– I’m not quite old enough to be worried about breaking a hip in a fall or anything but who the hell knows– my son was in the house but it was going to be several hours until he noticed he hadn’t seen me in a while, and my phone wasn’t going to be reachable without crawling across the shower, and one way or another there is no way I’m allowing any EMTs in the bathroom with me until I’ve managed to put some underwear on, which was also not especially reachable, so I’d probably have just decided to die instead.

But none of that happened, so I thought Okay, there’s today’s blog post sorted, dragged myself up to my feet and finished my shower.

The end.

Ow holy god shit ow OW in which I don’t OW go to the OW hospital OW but maybe OW I should? Ow.

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Jaws_Wired_Shut.pngI swear this just happened: I was getting my son ready for bed– read him a story and all– and was sort of wrestling and tickling and playing with him and he entirely accidentally elbowed me in the jaw and I swear to God he hit it just right and dislocated the fucking thing.  And like half a second later I just reached up with my hand and somehow, like, popped it back into place?  And there was a few seconds of absolutely tremendous horrifying pain and maybe another readjustment or two and now my whole face just feels swollen and weird and okay I can talk and I just ate something and I’m not dying but my face is not supposed to feel like this.  

Is that even a possible thing?  That my kid might have knocked my jaw out of place with an elbow and that I just put it back a half-second later without knowing what I was doing or even thinking about it?  Because really ow I didn’t like that very much but I feel like maybe I fixed it?

Also: ow.

Advice for those from warmer climes

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5405943268_e3280ff9f1_z.jpgIt never fails to fascinate me: that moment when you realize that your body has adapted to winter, because what was “cold” a few weeks ago is no longer even worth noticing.

I am a Midwesterner.  If you are from Florida, or Arizona, or Southern By-God California or somewhere similarly godforsaken, you may not be aware of what winter is like around here.  Today was in the low thirties, what we call “t-shirt weather” around here.  Last week it was cold.  If I brought you up here in cold weather, you would die.  I would stand there, wearing a t-shirt, not even shivering, wondering why you were dying and quietly suspecting that the human race’s future prospects were probably being improved.  But you would die.  There is no doubt about it.

But yeah: when the last week has seen consistent below zero temperatures, and especially when the wind chills get into the dozens of degrees below zero (it hasn’t been that cold yet, but it will be) when a day in the thirties or even low forties rolls around, we don’t even notice that shit anymore.  That’s wake up and think about putting on shorts weather.  It’s nothing.

Today was one of those days.  It was damn near warm all day, and sunny besides, and the sun was doing a damn good job of melting the leftover, unplowed ice off of the parking lots and roads and driveways around the area.

And then it became night, and it got much colder.  I’d say it probably dropped 20 degrees in an hour.  And all that water that was on the roads and the parking lots and the driveways because the ice and slush had been melting refroze.

Are you familiar with the term “black ice,” Person of a Warmer Clime?  Black ice is what happens when a thin sheen of ice forms on a surface– generally, on a paved surface, which is why it is called black ice.  It is transparent and can be damn near invisible under the right circumstances, and a lot of the time a patch of asphalt covered in black ice just looks a little wet.  It’s dangerous as hell, to both drivers and walkers.

Sometimes, for example, you’re walking back to your car after a day much like I’ve just described, and you step on a patch of black ice despite knowing what you’re in for and walking very fucking carefully.  And you don’t fall down!  No, instead, you discover that suddenly your foot is next to your ear, but you are still upright and to the casual observer it must look like you are executing some sort of badass martial arts move or perhaps an impromptu Nazi goose-step or Cleesian silly walk, only you’re a fat old man who is incapable of such things by either poor flexibility, personal politics, or both.  Then, somehow, you’re still standing on both feet, only you heard at least three distinct pops out of your hip while your foot was on walkabout (see what I did there?) and you had a brief moment where you thought wow, that actually feels good before the shattering pain kicked in and then you drive home, your thoughts drifting back and forth between Percocet and the emergency room.

tl;dr it’s icy out and I may need a cane tomorrow.

POSTSCRIPT:  Managed to get my shoes off.  I have been wearing two different color socks all day today.  The end.

Braindump

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gdpkydhfdudxkukpespxHaving a fair amount of trouble getting started today, and I really need today to be productive, so have a grab-bag post.  Hopefully something in this somewhere is at least a little bit entertaining:

  • This article is dumb, or at least the headline is so dumb as to render the rest of the article dumb by association.  One of the best pieces of advice I got while my wife was pregnant (not “while we were pregnant,” because we weren’t pregnant, she was) was that I should not be surprised or alarmed if it took a while to get used to the idea that the child my wife had was my child and that I was supposed to connect to it and like it more than other kids.  I’ll be honest: it took a year, and I might be being optimistic in that timeline.  While I appreciate the author recognizing that the male partners of women who have miscarriages have a right to have feelings about said miscarriage, the idea that “men have miscarriages” is ludicrous.  There’s simply no way I can be as invested in an unborn child as the woman the child is growing inside of.  Stupid.
  • Does the “of” belong there?  I’ve tried it both ways and neither looks right.  Generally my strategy in this type of situation is to entirely rewrite the sentence and dodge the issue but I don’t wanna.
  • Today’s edition of The World is Unfair and Stupid:  A Twitter buddy discovered this horrifying story somehow yesterday and gleefully live-Tweeted reading it; the story is, as of writing this, in the top 100,000 on Amazon, meaning the author’s sold in the neighborhood of a dozen or so copies in the last day or so.  At $2.99.  For a 12-page story.  Meanwhile, while I’m really happy about how Benevolence Archives 1 has been doing on Smashwords and Openbooks.com lately, all of my books have been dying on the shelf at Amazon.  Remember Skylights, y’all?  It’s a good book!  And it’s also $2.99 right now!  Sigh.
  • I did something to my ankle last week, or maybe the week before.  Annoyingly nonspecific?  Yeah, because I have no idea what I did.  It doesn’t hurt, precisely; I just had a day where I realized going down a flight of stairs that I was in serious danger of falling every time I had my weight on my right ankle, and it hasn’t gotten better.  It only hurts sporadically and when I do certain things with it (doctor’s advice: “Well, then, don’t do those things.”) but it’s weak all the time now.  It sucks.
  • My A to Z post is about Heavy D today, and as a result I’m listening to Heavy D right now.  He’s got an entire song called Don’t Curse, and I’ve always, as I said in the post, used him as an example of clean rap.  He also drops the line “happy like a faggot in jail” in one of his songs, which I had completely forgotten about until it leapt out and ambushed my ears a few minutes ago.  I suspect if he were still alive he would have rewritten that line by now.  Odd that in 1991 the word didn’t even scan to him as profanity.
  • I initially wrote “faggot” as “fa**ot.”  Then rewrote it.  There are three words I try to never use; that’s one of them.  Still don’t like the idea of censoring it, apparently.
  • Continuing to enjoy the hell out of Bloodborne.  The difficulty is overrated.  It’s not difficult.  It’s challenging.  Every time I die, it’s because I screwed up, and practice is consistently rewarded with progress.  I’d say the difficulty level is just about perfect, actually.

Gonna try and get some actual work done now.

On perspective

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I was gonna rant about the HIMYM finale tonight, but one of my DC kids got hit by a car today.  She’s in the hospital.  (A few things broken, currently in the “could have been way worse” stage of “bad.”)

Not especially in the mood any longer.  That doesn’t mean I won’t be tomorrow, but… nah, not today.