The day is drawing to a close and I am sitting on my bed, following a two-year-old's advice, and feeling that I've finally hit on the safe course of action.
About 45 minutes before the end of work, I stubbed my big toe badly on the open door of the filing cabinet. My immediate feeling was that this was Someone Else's fault, which quickly shifted to the belief that Someone Else was going to keep me from wearing sandals at work if they found out. Perhaps more importantly, I just didn't feel like dealing with both the toe and new coworkers. (Though a nicer toe or nicer coworkers would be hard to find: it was just the mixture that was too rich). So I got the papers I had come for, went back to my desk, observed that the blood matched the toenail enamel pretty closely, and was also emerging at a slow ooze (having to come from under the nail), so I felt that No One Would Know. And no one did. I was highly productive until quitting time, and then the Venerable Volvo of Virtue and I enjoyed our evening drive home. (The Volvo of Virtue is like that: prone to enjoying things, I mean. We do not have air conditioning, so we enjoy the gentle breeze coming through the sunroof. And we feel that the freeways are vulgar, so we enjoy the backroad which winds twixt heavy industry and golf courses. Finally, we always enjoy WRR101.1, one of the highlights of Dallas culture.)
After a couple of hours my toe began to complain again, so I went in search of a receptacle suitable for soaking it and some hydrogen peroxide (I have not re-stocked my house, partially because I'm not sure what I have in my storage unit, and partially because I'm feeling stubbornly opposed to the idea of spending the money. Eventually I'll feel like it would be fun to spend money on hydrogen peroxide but there's no need to rush these things.) The two-year-old daughter of a friend told me I needed ice and wanted me to get ice from her freezer Right Away. I wanted to marvel more at her worldly-wise ways and resisted. Her mother suggested that I line a pot with a plastic bag, fill it with water and hydrogen peroxide (provided by her) soak my foot in it, then boil some water in the pot to kill any foot-germs that may have soaked through. Again, sound advice. On returning home, I soaked the foot until I felt like I'd had my foot in cool water in a plastic bag in a pot for the better part of my young life, dealt with the interesting problem of being in the living room with a lot of water and no towels, cleaned everything up, and set the pot to boil.
A while later, as I lay in bed saying my evening rosary and thinking about Solzhenitsyn (I started a novena to St. Joseph for him 1. because when is it NOT a good idea and 2. I figured Solzhenitsyn would be in favor of it), it seemed to me that the air was not as cool as it should be, so much so that I imagined I smelt something burning. I thought about little Samivel, the best dachshund in the world, who had alerted me when this very air conditioning unit had gone into a blue funk some four years ago, and about the subtle smell which had floated through the air on that occasion. And although I knew the air was warm simply because I had not set the thermostat correctly, still the aroma lingered. Two seconds later I was out of bed and running down the stairs.
This is the second pot that I have boiled dry in a week. This is again clearly Someone Else's fault. But as long as I'm concerned with Someone Elses, I figured I might as well follow the advice of the two-year-old one, and am now happy in bed with ice on my foot and a P.G. Wodehouse book next to me.
