"Tales From the Crip" OR "My Left Croc" OR "A Not-So-Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Shower"

No, Val has not been invaded by a body-snatcher and turned into a pod person awaiting transformation into a nonagenarian. However, she DOES feel the need to discuss her rheumatism and all that ails her with her most intimate internet friends. Every post cannot be about my mom’s life, Auction Meat, and sweet, sweet Juno, you know.

Last night there was a near-calamity near the kitchen sink. As The Pony filled my bubba cup full of ice from Frig’s door spout, something went horribly awry. The cup slipped sideways, refunding its contents onto the red-and-white vinyl flooring. The Pony set to retrieving the icy quarter-moons and tossed them into the sink.

I stepped into the work zone to grab a bowl for The Pony’s leftover roast vegetables, and trod upon a frozen fragment. My left Croc absorbed most of the shock, but it started to slide. I quickly stomped my right red-Croc-shod foot down so as not to flip backward and give myself an incurable subdural hematoma. Sons of people who live on blood-thinners shouldn’t throw ice. Maybe I’ll make that into a t-shirt to sell in hospital pharmacies and gift shops.

The jamming of the knee that I injured getting out of the shower caused it to bend slightly backwards, and flood with blood inside the joint capsule when I took my medicine a half hour later. Funny how a blood THINNER can make my knee FATTER!

So…after a painful evening and night, I arose slowly and hobbled through my morning routine. It’s hard to bend my sore neck to scope out the forest-green floor tile of the master bathroom. But I was fairly confident that the pea gravel and cedar chips from Hick’s work boots had been swept away.

OUCH!

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the shower. In the dogleg left from the sink past the corner triangle tub, in the area just in front of the wastebasket that resides between toilet and tub, a razor-sharp sliver of the unknown imbedded itself into my right heel.

YOW!

Like a mutt’s butt unacquainted with toilet paper, my heel dragged itself across one of the bathroom throw rugs in an effort to scrape off the offending freeloader. After three tries, it dropped off. A large crescent of toenail, the likes not seen in the Thevictorian household since The Unfortunate Braided Rug Toenail Incident of 1994, mocked me from the edge of the rug. I could not bend over to pick it up, what with my swollen knee and recently broken neck.

I woke up Hick to get ready for work, and asked him to pick up his toenail to prevent future incidents which could render his beloved wife’s heel as leaky as the trunk of a Vermont maple in March. And do you know what my sweet baboo did?

He said, “It’s not my toenail.”

Uh huh. Because a clodhopper-shod working man’s toenail looks exactly like the toenail of a dainty petite flower such as Val.

I’ve a good mind to go all CSI on him and test for DNA. Yep. And wave the results in his face, shouting, “The proof is in the toenail pudding!”

I fear that justice would not be served, however, but that Hick would wax all Homer-Simpsonesque, and mumble, “Pudding? I LOVE pudding!”

Then I would slip in his puddle of drool and skewer a vital organ on the toilet paper holder.