{"id":3807,"date":"2014-03-30T10:26:31","date_gmt":"2014-03-30T15:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=3807"},"modified":"2014-03-30T10:31:44","modified_gmt":"2014-03-30T15:31:44","slug":"painful-flashbacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=3807","title":{"rendered":"Painful Flashbacks"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend the wonderful and funny Diane Henders<\/a> recently posted a few notes about times she’s managed to hurt herself in somewhat embarrassing fashions, and called for comments.\u00a0 As I commented, it occurred to me that many of you might appreciate some of my pain as well.<\/p>\n

Despite having inadvertently proven that I cannot support my body weight with my left arm at full extension, by dint of dislocating said left arm at the shoulder\u00a0 … twice\u00a0 ….\u00a0 my best, if that’s the right word for it,\u00a0was actually an incident involving the lawn.\u00a0 I was outside, mowing the grass.\u00a0 (I suppose this would have been a much more interesting story had I been inside mowing the grass.)\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0I decided that the grass needed to be shorter than I was making it, so I stopped the mower – of course I stopped the mower!\u00a0 I’m not stupid, after all.\u00a0 I stopped the mower, then adjusted the wheels next to me.\u00a0 Being always economical of motion, which is not the same as lazy, thank you very much, I leaned over the mower to adjust the wheels on the other side.\u00a0 I realized I didn’t have the leverage to quite reach, so I leaned on the top of the mower with my right hand.<\/p>\n

Do you know what’s on the top of the mower?\u00a0 The exhaust manifold, it turns out.\u00a0 Can you describe the exhaust manifold of a gas mower that’s been running for 10 minutes or so?\u00a0 If you said, HOT, you’re right.<\/p>\n

There were two parts of this that were embarrassing.\u00a0 The first was that my wife insisted on driving me to the local ER\/Clinic.\u00a0 This is not a full fledged ER or hospital, this is just a “patch them up, put it in a cast and send them on their way” type station.\u00a0 We walked in and the people behind the desk started panicking, telling us, “No, no!\u00a0 We’re not equipped, we can’t do this here!”<\/p>\n

That’s when I realized that they were looking at a man walking in under his own power next to his 8-and-a-half-months pregnant wife.\u00a0 SOBUMD waved them off, pointed at me, and said, “Don’t worry, I’m with Stupid.”<\/p>\n

The worst part of the ER trip was that this time, SOBUMD was with me when the nurse asked me when my last tetanus shot had been.\u00a0 “Oh, I don’t remember, but certainly in the last 3 or 4 years,” said the guy who hates needles and really didn’t want a tetanus shot.\u00a0 “You liar,” piped up my lovely bride, “we’ve been married more than 11 years and you haven’t had a tetanus shot since I’ve known you!”\u00a0 WHAM, right in the shoulder, like my body didn’t hurt enough already.<\/p>\n

But that wasn’t the MOST embarrassing part of burning myself on the lawn mower.\u00a0 That was reserved for the scar, which was, essentially, a brand.\u00a0 You see, the exhaust manifold of the mower assumes that you might not read English, so the warnings are in symbols.\u00a0 Specifically, there’s a picture of a hand – a right hand, even – inside a circle, with a big line through it:\u00a0 a universal Do Not Touch<\/strong>.\u00a0 This symbol, along with several of the holes from the exhaust manifold, was now neatly branded onto my palm.<\/p>\n

There are few things that have ever managed to highlight my own idiocy as effectively.\u00a0 I couldn’t use my mouse hand for week.\u00a0 This was also about the time that my neighbors stopped letting me use power tools….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The exhaust manifold assumes that you might not read English, so the warnings are in symbols. Specifically, there’s a picture of a hand inside a circle, with a big line through it: a universal Do Not Touch. This was now neatly branded onto my palm. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3807"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3811,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807\/revisions\/3811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}