Better and Worse

I've been a busy little bee lately, through better and worse. Better--I've discovered that the Instant Play feature of the Netflix membership Aunt Pam gave me for Christmas is awesome! I've spent all my free time the past few days cutting out postage stamp squares for my swap and pasting clippings of my comic strip, Still Life with Grad Student, into my scrapbooks while watching The Office seasons one and two and Dead Like Me season two, all on the comfort of my Internet connection.

Worse--this afternoon, with Willow at school and Sydney just down for a nap, I managed to step on a broken sewing machine needle and embed it into my heel, nothing sticking out but a sliver of silver and some thread. I tried to pull it out myself, just could not do it, called my partner and got his voicemail, fantasized about waking Sydney up and driving us over the the walk-in clinic but just could not imagine how that would work, and so limped, barefoot, in the 35-degree freezing rain, over to my next door neighbor's house. Her mother-in-law, visiting from India, took one look and left the room, but all Marianne herself said was "Oh, my God," before sitting me down on the floor and deftly extracting the needle, although she did not tell me exactly when she was going to do it, as I specifically instructed her to. The mother-in-law re-entered to give me a tissue, as I was bleeding onto their carpet, but she wouldn't let me apply pressure to the wound, instead insisting that I squeeze it "to let the toxins out." It may fly in the face of conventional US medicine, but that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I also got a special disinfectant imported from India, and a special poofy bandage Marianne got at the hospital while giving birth, so all in all, it was still pretty awesome.