How I Injured Myself

The Temporohumorous Field, a recently-discovered 5th force of nature, causes funny things to become less so later on, and not-funny things to become downright hilarious as time passes.

This happened a few years ago, naturally making it a lot less funny now than it was then.  Or is it funnier now, because it was painful at the time that it occurred.  Or is it . . . no, I'd better stop now before I injure my brain.



How I Injured Myself at the Shed


I went up to the Shed last weekend with the intention of getting on top of the firewood situation, but I came back  with a piece missing.

I've been using a lot of firewood lately due to the chilly Bindoon nights.  Fortunately I got my chainsaw working again, so I could finally do something about replenishing the supply.  As I was revving away through various logs, tree trunks, branches and the occasional large spider, I wasn't paying the fullest attention to what I was doing.  I looked down, and I'm sure you've seen this one coming, I found myself standing in the middle of, yes, you guessed it:

a large pile of firewood.

Some of it was too big for the wood stove and needed to be split.  So I put the chainsaw away, got out my trusty Splitting Maul (actually not so trusty as it broke the next day - I suggest getting a steel-handled one as described in the link)  and started bashing away.  Then, as often happens in these type of situations, the blade missed its mark, glanced off the log and hit the ground, narrowly missing my foot and hitting a large rock instead.  With the edge dented, the job would be even harder.   So I went inside the Shed and set up the grinding wheel.

As I was leaning in to the grinding wheel to get that perfect edge on my axe, I could feel sparks from the wheel hitting my fingers.  I could feel the axe head getting hot, too.  I also started to feel very hungry, so I put the axe down, turned off the grinder and went to make a sandwich.

The bread was unsliced, so I got out the cheap thrift-store breadknife that I keep at the Shed and started sawing away, sawing and sawing and sawing back and forth through the bread, when I momentarily became distracted by an interesting thought.  "Why am I wasting my time with sandwiches when there's a nice steak in the freezer?"

So I put the useless breadknife away and got out the frozen steak.  I decided that while the cast-iron skillet was warming up on the portable gas stove, I would try to trim off some of the fat using my Swiss Army knife.  You know how holding a frozen steak with one hand while trying to cut with the other makes your fingers frozen, numb, and more than a little clumsy?  Well, that didn't happen to me, because as I was getting the knife out, I had yet another thought.

What else goes really good with steak?  Grilled onions!  Mmmm.

It was delicious.  But I nicked the tip of my left thumb while slicing the onion.  You can never be too careful when doing reckless, dangerous things like eating vegetables.