Hurt

(Trouble maker in 1980)

I mentioned before that I very rarely get hurt mountain biking. I seldom crash and when I do I seem to jettison from the bike and manage a gentle landing. I never really got hurt as a kid. This is absolutely amazing considering the dumb things I did. These things could be a blog onto itself but let me just grab a good example…BB gun fights.

Friends and I would have these BB gun fights in the woods. BB guns just didn’t have enough oomph so Mike and I decided to use .22 caliber rifles. It would be irresponsible to shoot each other with normal rounds, we realized this even as adolescents, so we removed some gunpowder from the shells and replaced the lead bullets with wax. What could go wrong with this plan? Mike took a shot at me in his parent’s basement. He missed. The wax bullet went through the wall behind me and dented the refrigerator in the other room. Mike and I, stunned by the damage we just witnessed, looked at each other and thought the same thing: let’s add as much gunpowder as we can cram in a standard .22 shell and see what happens. It blew the bolt apart in my Stephenson bolt action .22 and was so loud that my brother in law heard the noise from his doctor’s office across the street and thought we were shooting his 7MM magnum. So it went during my tumultuous youth, suffering nothing more than minor powder burns on my forearms and singeing my eyebrows (that’s another story).

My department just issued a new requirement where we must ware side shields on our safety glasses at all times. I do not work in an industrial setting, and no one has ever suffered an eye injury in my building, but I imagine management is trying to protect us, maybe against a paper cut to the eyeball which sounds painful, if not highly unlikely. The side shields prevent the safety glasses’ arms from opening all the way. I was putting on my safety glasses yesterday and the partially closed arm poked my eye. It really hurt. This morning my eye lid was so swollen and crusty that I had to run it under warm water before I could open it. I should probably have it checked out but I refuse to allow poking myself in the eye with my safety glasses send me to the hospital. The techs I work with would have lots of amusing things to say about that.