A hammer and a nail (no ambulance required)

While searching for my Krazy Glue to fix my torn fingernail, I dropped a hammer on my foot.

It started at the Target mothership in Minneapolis a few years ago, where a friend and I enabled each other's purchases to the tune of $350 in merchandise and closed down the store.  One of my purchases was knives: a pretty blue chef's knife and a pretty yellow parer.

Every time I have used that pretty little yellow paring knife I have almost cut myself.  Slicing asparagus the other day, I thought, "I don't need a bigger knife -- and I will pay attention this time."  And I sliced the side of my thumb.

I was so frustrated I finished cutting the asparagus and making dinner while blood soaked paper towel after paper towel.  I called a friend to find out if I had to go to the hospital.  I survived the bleeding, but I had sliced my nail, and I knew it would snag and tear.

My next source was the web.  It turns out that you can repair a torn nail with a teabag and Krazy Glue. Hence the search for the glue, which was in my toolbox, and then the falling hammer.

Lots of pain, instant icing and ibuprofen.  I googled the bones in the foot to identify that it was my fifth metatarsal that was hit and then googled how to know if it was broken.  Someone said she was a doctor and just reset it herself and moved on.  I poked at my painful fifth metatarsal and couldn't figure out through the pain if something was out of line. Once again: Do I go to the hospital?  Maybe I could get my thumb stitched up, too.

Surprisingly, my foot is not broken. The Krazy Glue tube had dried up.  Given that last time I tried to use it I got it all over my hands and everything around me, this could be for the best.

Couscous injury

I have had a band-aid on the ball of my right thumb for several days. You can kind of see the blood seeping through the gauze. I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me what I did. Then I can tell them that I injured it on couscous.

To my credit, it was Israeli couscous, which is bigger and more substantial than regular couscous.

I was trying to pop some dried couscous out of a bowl, and that last piece stuck. I raked my thumb across it, drawing blood. The world's first couscous injury.