Living with a BooBoo

Living with a BooBoo

It’s been two days since I sliced off the top of my thumb with a really sharp Japanese sickle blade and my left thumb has mostly stopped throbbing, but is still very much bandaged up for protection while that nasty wound heals. The good news is that it was a very clean slice that took off a wedge chapped piece of the gardening glove I was wearing and a small piece of the thumb and its nail all at a rakish angle. It has occurred to me that I have an added risk in my life in that I suspect that some garden critter has long since found and eaten that small piece of my thumb and probably decided that I taste quite good. I’m hoping the offending flesh-eater is a small band of insects rather than the local bobcat that prowls those regions of the front garden. I do not need any wild animal confrontations to add spice to my life.

This is an unusual week for me for both usual and unusual reasons. In the category of usual, I guess I need to say that this is Kim’s biannual Encore show preparation week during which she has intensive daily rehearsals down near San Diego proper, this time at a private school auditorium venue in Carmel Valley. That means that she has to leave here around three o’clock and only returns around 11pm. That makes for a long day for her and a dining conundrum for me. I don’t like it as much in life when Kim isn’t by my side. It’s less about the stepping and fetching she does for me around dinner time, and much more about the companionship. Betty dispenses with me most nights after she has gotten whatever table scraps or treats she thinks she can from me and she wanders into the bedroom for her evening nap. She more or less ignores me when Kim isn’t around and her belly is full (never full enough). That means I have dining choices to make every day of this week. I’ve already done one pre-packaged chicken and rice meal, one delivered thin-crust pizza from CPK, and yesterday, I was invited to Mike and Melisa’s for a lovely dinner of Mongolian Beef over Pork Fried Rice with a chaser of Trader Joe’s potstickers. Watching Melisa cook was like watching a Food Network show where everything was pre-measured and ready to go and the preparation was timed to a precision that only Mike’s 5pm dinner-on-the-table demands could predict. It was quite a show and the results were amazingly good. Melisa is her own commercial for fresh home cooking.

The other usual reason for activity this week is that I have a new expert witness case about the widows and orphans of a 401(k) plan getting raped and pillaged by a mean and nasty financial services company employer. This is a far more straight-forward case than others I have done, but it is also a more data-intensive one that requires lots of machinations to get the right perspective on the numbers to best characterize the harm done to the plan’s participants. I am going through that data gathering process with our team in Sicily, so I work through issues during the day and evening and then while I sleep, they organize the data per my requests and send me presentations to bear witness to my concerns. I spend blocks of time reading and analyzing and then blocks of time writing up my concerns followed by other blocks of time waiting for data to come back to validate or invalidate my thoughts. It has a rhythm to it that feels very normal to me at this point.

I can’t spend all my time doing nine-finger iPad typing, so I also try to spend some time in the garden doing light duty due to my injury. Yesterday I pulled some aging California poppies that were still pretty, but getting leggy as they approached the end of their natural life. Today I think I will fill up my 2-gallon sprayer with 30% concentrated vinegar, which is my organic anti-weed weapon of choice, recommended by my older sister, Kathy. I’ve already laid down 10 gallons of the stuff with great effect, but weeds are weeds and in this moist weather, they are flourishing and replacing their dead soldiers quite regularly and quickly. Therefore, I will load up the sprayer with two gallons of the intoxicating but rather astringent fluid and do what Arnold would say and pump it up. That strikes me as an acceptable activity for a guy with a sore thumb since it does not require excessive manual dexterity. Watch out weeds, nine-finger Rich is on the warpath.

That brings me to what is unusual about this unusual week. It’s sort of my first full week of summer since I am completely done with teaching and grading and everything to do with my courses. That makes me feel like I’m on vacation. Two thirds of my kids are off in Disneyworld in all its muggy wonderfulness, so that seems summery. But out here, the absence of morning sunshine (June Gloom seems less special when it follows May Mush and April Showers and March Maelstroms and February Freeze and January Whatever) means that it doesn’t really feel summery yet even though I know it is going to very soon bring a bellyflop of heat, if not here, then when we head west into Arizona in another ten days. I would like to get in some motorcycle saddle time to callus my butt for that 1,800 mile ride, but my thumb BooBoo is keeping me away from doing any proper rides beyond my neighborhood.

And that is the really unusual part of this unusual week. My bandaged thumb is slowing me down. Strangely enough and quite fortunately so, it does little to impede my iPad typing. In fact, it might actually make me faster since it focuses my attention and I probably make fewer mistakes by that virtue. I seem to have temporarily lost my lingering Caps dysfunction where I capitalize the second letter in otherwise capitalized words. Forcing me to go back and make time-consuming corrections. I guess my left thumb is the culprit of that malady, unbeknownst to me previously. But just try to put on a buttoned shirt without your left thumb in the mix. It does not go easily. The wad of surgical bunting on my thumb also impacts my multi-tasking ability. I will usually work on my iPad while I watch mindless TV and eat my meals on my rolling sofa table. It turns out that is a two-fisted endeavor. My left hand is dedicated to shoveling food into my mouth while my left hand is responsible for keeping me in drink. But that bandaged thumb makes that drinking like the old joke of the guy who spills water down his chest and says he has a drinking problem. Well, I have a drinking problem thanks to this thumb BooBoo.

In the grand scheme of life, my thumb BooBoo is not such a big disability, but it reminds me of how fragile life can be. I lost my thumb tip with a brisk swing of the sickle blade, and there was no going back from there. The damage was irreversible. The thumb will heal and the nail will also grow back, but I will likely always have a reminder of my injury. It will be less about phantom feeling in that thumb tip (that’s way too Telltale Heart for this injury) and more about the likely scar and flattened profile of the thumb itself. It will remind me to be careful with my sharp toys and to stop working in the garden when I start to get fatigued. The word BooBoo is a pejorative term that implies needless winging by someone who cannot take minor pain. That sounds a lot like me this week. And here’s the most unusual part of that, it is totally normal and not unusual for me to be overly focused on some inconvenience that is so otherwise small and insignificant as living with a BooBoo.