Wednesday, June 3, 2009

First Day with the New Legs?

So the other day I come home from work early, and the trash can was at the end of the driveway. This is not unusual, as just that morning I had hauled it out to the curb for garbage pickup. Since my car parks in the can, and the trash collector had already been through, I thought I would be nice and drag it up to the house for the hubby. That right there should have been a guarantee that things would go smoothly.

I parked my car at the end of our driveway and towed the green can into the garage, shoving it up against the wall where it belonged. Heading back down the driveway to my car, I could hear the neighbor's wiener dog (Kirby, the mouth with legs) alerting everyone in a 6-block radius that he REALLY should be punted over the fence like a football. I turned my head and yelled at him over my shoulder, which was also my cue to begin an acrobatic performance that can only be described as "hippo, only less elegant". SOMEHOW, over the past 30+ years of my life, I had not yet mastered the art of walking and talking. My right foot landed on a small stick on our pavement driveway, and I went down like a walrus on rollerblades. The worst part was when I suddenly realized "I am going to catch myself with my face!"

I am not a graceful person by any means. I regularly run into the counter in our kitchen with my hips, leaving me to lament just HOW many axe handles across must my azz be for me to not even be able to successfully navigate within 4 feet of walking space without knocking into something. However, that generally happens within the privacy of my own home. As my face hurtled toward the front bumper of my car with frightening velocity, I realized that I was out on a public street and that this was really going to hurt.

My forehead narrowly missed the car and instead hit the pavement, while at the same time I emitted a noise similar to what I would anticipate a constipated buffalo sounds like. After a stunned silence of about 2 seconds (during which our neighbors' bastrd mutt continued to bay like a hound of H3ll), I gingerly rolled to my side and checked to see whether I could see the bones in my hands. Finding no blood there, I pulled off my glasses which had been mashed onto my face by the impact, peering through the lens to see a perfect impression left by the oil on my forehead. I looked around for my dignity unsuccessfully, and then decided that I would be better off trying to find THAT in the house. Cursing LOUDLY to myself, I pushed myself to my feet and climbed into my car. Pulling it into the garage, I shut both garage doors behind me and went in to inspect the damage.

As it turns out, the only place where I actually broke the skin was the top of my "index" toe on my right foot (I was wearing sandals). I caught most of my weight (no small feat) on my right knee, scraping it up a little bit but not even tearing a hole in my khakis. I also managed to shave off the top of the toe on my brand new sandals, scrape up my right forearm, mildly sprain my pinky finger, and of course scrape my forehead. Once I had triaged my injuries, I immediately set about the task of berating myself in my best outside voice. "What the fck?? Who the fck falls down on dry pavement and catches themself with their face?? Honestly! How fcking retarded are you to fall down like that? And how the fck did you hit your face?"

Finally realizing that this was, at the very least, comic gold, I finally finished my barrage of self-profanity and picked up the phone. This was a story worth sharing! I ended up calling both my husband and my parents, and also as an afterthought sent an instant message to my boss just in case I came into the office with a black eye the next day.