As usual, I recently realized that I haven’t written here for a bit (ten days). I’m not sure I can think of much that is memorable about last week, though now that I say that I guess I did have a nice, and brief, trip home. While I was home I spent some time hanging out with a friend I hadn’t seen much of recently, and on my way back to the City I took a new route on two-lane roads through small towns and the countryside, as opposed to the usual route through or around a large city on the Interstate, so that was nice. I worked Thursday night, and then the next several nights, and nothing particularly memorable comes to mind about those nights.

Then there was Sunday. After playing our ongoing Pathfinder adventure (“Rise of the Runelords”) with my roommate and a new player that is joining us, I left for work. I’m not sure exactly how long I’ve been working until midnight on Sundays, but probably at least since the beginning of this year, possibly give or take a few months. This is relevant information because, usually, Sunday nights there are two people working at my place of employment – one of us in the kitchen, and one of us behind the register. Sunday nights used to be fairly slow, but recently they’ve been relatively busy, and I suspect summer is to blame. Not only do I dislike summer and warm weather, I think it being too hot to cook is a factor. If I didn’t have a nice air-conditioned apartment and needed food, and didn’t work at my current job, I might also consider ordering pizza and/or sandwiches.

Anyway, Sunday there were a few orders within the first hour and a half, and I was starting to dread the recent trend of it being busy from about 5 PM to some time after dark (8 or 9 PM, approximately). Around 5:40 PM, I cut my right hand with a box knife while trying to cut open a box of taco sauce packets. I’ve cut myself at work before, but breaking the skin with a knife while cutting vegetables, as I did a couple times last winter, isn’t quite the same as slicing through one’s hand with a box knife. At first I thought maybe I’d be able to get by with a bandage, but I decided I should probably at least have it looked at, so after trying to get it to stop bleeding with paper towels (and not having much luck) I called my manager and took a few more orders, managing to make one pizza. My manager came in about fifteen minutes after I called her, and had me stop the bleeding while she tried to find someone willing to come in and take over the kitchen so she could take me to have my wound looked at. She did find someone who answered their phone and was willing to come in, but they lived on the other side of town, so it was a bit before the replacement came in. Finally, the replacement came in about 6:50 PM and my manager drove me to a walk-in clinic that previous co-workers who hurt themselves had gone to.

Long story short, I got a few stitches and a tetanus shot. My previous experiences with stitches include falling down some stairs when I was 3, which led to stitches on my cheek, and an incident about 10 years ago (well, 10 years and a few months) with a track starting block when I was in junior high which tore up some skin on my left pinky finger. I’ve had the good fortune to be fairly healthy and rarely needing a doctor, other than the occasional accident and a couple surgeries.

I’ve been working at my current place of employment for 2 years as of last Wednesday, and for my current company for 3 years as of July 16, and it’s probably good that I hadn’t hurt myself before then. Also luckily, I had three days off scheduled anyway, but today is the last of those, and I’m not really looking forward to going back to work and having to deal with my right hand being less than effective. It’s slightly annoying only having 1.5 effective hands.