Even here in the Great Frozen North, summer is coming. Nay, for all practical purposes, it is here, since we don’t celebrate Spring much here. We have winter and summer.
I say this because, with the advent of summer comes home improvement season, and thus long walks through the aisles of the local Home Depot.
Now, I could regale you with tales of house construction, of eighteen different types of hammers, of discovering that HOLY CRAP sheets of T-111 are expensive. Rather, however, I shall spin a yarn of sawdust.
This sawdust was happy, and lived happily ‘twixt two sheets of plywood. Until, that is, an innocent passerby happened to raise the top sheet of plywood and then release it, thus expelling two pieces into the air, and thus directly into the eyeball-apparatus of said passerby.
This passerby (me, if you’re having trouble keeping up) then rubbed and rubbed, trying to get the sawdust out, with some luck. However, there was an unintentional side effect.
Keep in mind that each of these two pieces of sawdust was roughly the size of a Volkswagen. Rubbing your eyes when a Volkswagen-sized piece of dirt is in there is never a good idea. The result? A corneal abrasion.
Yeah, it’s fancy talk for “I scratched my eyeball.”
If you’ve done it before, you feel for me. It hurts, and entails a trip to the emergency room, where I was poked and prodded and half-drowned as they washed out the eye and proceeded to put all sorts of drops and chemicals and what-have-you into the eye, such that it seemed like a good idea to just keep the original sawdust in there instead.
Still, I let them have their fun, and I walked out of there with a tube of antibiotic cream to go in my eye for five days and a worthless Vicodin prescription (worthless because not only does Vicodin do nothing for me, but these were for 5 mg pills. I don’t think a large termite could get pain relief from 5 milligrams of Vicodin.)
I have had to put “Vicodin” into M$ Word’s dictionary. I feel dirty, somehow.
I wonder if Hunter S. Thompson ever had to do that.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:21 am
funniest tale of corneal abrasion ever.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Thanks, though it didn’t feel that funny at the time.
Nice to see you around here, Lea!
May 14th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Yet another reason to stay the Hell out of Home Depot.
If you need stronger Vicodin, let me know - I have three bottles of it in my house from my shoulder surgery and vasectomy.
Ah, crap…I think I just committed a felony.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:16 am
I won’t tell anybody if you don’t. It’s not like this is a highly-frequented blog.
(Pssst. I’ll email you my address…)