Smashed Fingers

Its another lovely snowy morning in Kentucky and I once again find myself sitting at the Floyd House kitchen table waiting along with Kate to see if and when we will be making our way into work. Our manager has already called to let us know that we have at least a couple hours until we could potentially be allowed to leave for work so the two of us have decided to use this unexpected free time to post on our respective blogs. (Kate blogs for CAP's website and her posts can be found HERE.)

In light of my last week at work, I have decided that it is high time that I dedicate a post to my uncanny ability to incur some sort of injury every day of work. Most of these injuries are self-inflicted and due to the unfortunate combination of my clumsiness and a construction site.

*Before I continue on with this blog post, I feel I should throw a little disclaimer out there for my poor parents who already worry incessantly about me especially after the dremel incident. Have no fear Pete and Sue, the injuries I am about to describe are not nearly as terrible or life-threatening as you may be imagining and I have yet to require another trip to our lovely local hospital.*

To help you all understand the type of injuries I am referring to, I am going to walk you through just one of my days last week. On Monday, I managed to smash and bruise both my left pinky finger and thumb with a hammer, put my foot through a rotted out bedroom floor, crush the middle finger on my left hand with a flat bar, and somehow I found a way to bruise behind my right arm above my elbow (I still am dumbfounded as to how I accomplished this). This all happened in just ONE day so you can imagine the number and extent of the injuries I accumulate over the course of a week or a month or a year of volunteering. I am both excited for and saddened by the thought of the day when I am not constantly sporting an array of cuts, scrapes, and bruises that set me apart as a clumsy housing volunteer.

While we're on the topic of self-inflicted injuries, I thought I might as well briefly describe a different source of self-inflicted pain I recently brought upon myself. This past Saturday Kate and I went on an adventure to Pikeville to find Southern Steel Tattoos and Body Piercing. It is a sort of tradition among a good portion of CAP volunteers to mark their time in Kentucky with a tattoo. Since I want to get the most out of my time at CAP, I felt I couldn't miss out on this rite of passage. However, there is nothing that I am ready to permanently ink into my skin so instead I decided to get a new piercing - an industrial. I figure if I can withstand getting stitches in my eyelid without any medication then I can handle getting two holes pierced in my cartilage. As I was sitting waiting anxiously for the piercing to commence, the piercer asked me how I was feeling and if I was nervous. I told her that I was a little nervous mainly because I couldn't remember how bad piercings hurt as its been a little while since I got one. Her response was "Oh, this one hurts pretty good; you'll remember it for awhile". Let me tell you, she wasn't lying. Right now the bar in between the two piercings is a strange sort of curved plastic piece as you can see above, but in 4-6 weeks once it heals I'm going to replace it with a stainless steel one.

Despite my never-ending stream of injuries, both work and non-work related, life in Kentucky is still good. I know that the work I do here, exhausting as it can be, is important and its making a difference - one smashed finger at a time.