February 12, 2009
You might have heard of the fickle finger of fate. Well, I have the 5-stitched finger of furnace fixing tonight! What happened was this: I got a call from Mom and Dad’s neighbor this evening, letting me know the heat was off at their house. (Mom and Dad are in Florida, and I have to take care of their place here in town when there’s a problem.) Sooo, I drove over (it’s just five minutes away), hoping for an easy solution. I was just there a few days ago for a similar situation, and all I needed to do was throw a breaker. This time, however, there was no such luck. The breaker had no effect. I checked the fuse, and it looked fine. Something was running in there, but no warm air was blowing out of the vents. So I took off the two front panels to look around…but there was nothing wrong that I could see. When I tried to put the panels back on, however, I didn’t reattach one of them properly, and it fell. I caught it, but it gashed my left pinky as it slid. Tore a nice big chunk out of the meat of my finger, just hanging by a flap of skin. So it was off to the emergency room! By the time I was done, I had five stitches in my little finger…this on the cusp of a weekend road trip to visit family in Erie! Talk about lousy luck. Now, my finger’s starting to hurt as the numbing agent wears off…my whole arm aches from the tetanus shot…and I can’t hit the “shift” key on my keyboard with my pinky, because it’s half-numb and wrapped in a mummy’s worth of gauze!
Can you say “AAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHH?”
But what’s a guy gonna do? Just keep rolling, I guess. Start over tomorrow and hope for better luck. Always keep moving forward, no matter what. This is just another “life roll,” and a minor one at that. And the good thing is, I’d already finished most of my writing on the new novel for the day by the time this happened.
So, apologies for the short post. As a consolation prize, here’s something from my current ongoing project to scan and archive photos from some of my many travels through the years. (I love to travel!) This one’s a shot of me in Lucerne, Switzerland from 1990. See you tomorrow!
