Friday, July 9, 2010

Wrist Watch!

This morning went weird on me after I fed the dogs, fixed breakfast, washed a load of laundry and walked eight more miles. As it softly rained outside I sat down at the kitchen table and typed out a few stories for our upcoming newsletter or maybe I should say—I tried to type out some stories? And it didn't help that my left wrist was a little sore.

As I typed along and moved one story with a picture from one page to another page, etc.—our friendly poltergeist showed up. Suddenly out of nowhere the fonts would change in the middle part of my story, or the plain text would turn into bold text or all caps. It was very frustrating to me to say the least.

As I kept having to stop so I could correct the unasked-for- changes that would suddenly appear in different stories on different pages it didn't make any sense to me because I use a Mac and things like that never happen with a Mac. When it finally dawned on me that it was our poltergeist messing with me again, I got up from my computer and switched on my salt lamp to calm things down and then I smudged the trailer with some sweet sage grass that my friend Cindy had given to me before she left for New Mexico, but unfortunately it didn't seem to help much.

When I finally had typed in Kinky's message on page one and made all of the poltergeist's corrections I went back to my office and printed it out. Then I went over to the Lodge for Kinky to read, but he was on the phone so I came home and asked Tony to please read it and look for any mistakes or typos that I made. Then the phone rang—it was Kinky.

"Nance, I found a few mistakes." Then he started laughing. "In paragraph three at the end of the second sentence you need to remove the word cat. Where it says 'This project is something that Cat Cousin Nancy.' I looked at my printed out copy and circled the word Cat and then I started laughing and told Kinky about my poltergeist trouble and he started laughing, too. When he told me that the word Bridges all needed to be put in italics I checked my hardcopy, because I had made sure to use italics, but he was right because now they were all in plain text thanks to our friendly ghost.

After I removed the word Cat and italicized all of the Bridges I spent the rest of my day writing more  stories for the newsletter while the poltergeist continued to insert small, intermittent changes in the text. By six o'clock my wrist was more than aching, so I went over to the Lodge to discuss my poltergeist problem, and the newsletter with Kinky.

While I was over there our friend Dr. Hy Penn showed up and the three of us had a nice visit. At one point while Kinky was talking on the phone I said, "Hy, I need some free medical advice, because I don't have health insurance which I know all doctors hate." I showed Hy my wrist and pointed to the area where it was throbbing and told him about typing seven to eight hours for the past three days.

"You have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Nance," Hy said, wearing a smile on his face and then he told me to try to keep my typing down to a minimum for a few days and to try not to bend my wrist and rest it on something straight.

When I came home I took his free advice. While Tony was back in his office plowing an imaginary field of fruit on Facebook I grabbed a dinner knife, a plastic quick tie fastener that police use to quickly handcuff bad people or what people in the country use to temporarily fix a fence, and one of my pretty pink bandanas.


I put the knife's blunt end under my wrist and secured it using the plastic tie and then I half-hollered down the hallway for Tony to please come help me, because I could not tie the pastel pink bandana by myself. When Tony saw the knife attached to my wrist he started laughing while he tied my favorite bandana close to my elbow so it could support the sharp end of the knife. Then he went back to his office to harvest another one of his imaginary crops.

As I end tonight's blog I am proud to say that I may look stupid wearing the attached kitchen knife to my arm and wrist, but it has really worked! As long as it has taken for me to write this blog tonight I have had no pain in my wrist, but that plastic tie is startin' to cut off the circulation from my wrist to my arm. so as soon as I get offline I plan do a little reading.

P.S. I wish that I could tell you about the nice, elderly couple that came out late today to visit us, but I can't. After they introduced themselves to us they told us that they were 'swingers' and they live in a nudist camp near Austin. I'm not sure why they felt the need to tell us that, but I'm glad they showed up in clothes. Not to be risque, but I'm fixin' to take off my wrist contraption if that is any of your business.

Y'all have a great evening!

1 comment:

Eileen said...

Which wrist Nancy? I've got one of those medical devices for my carpal tunnel but it's designed for the left hand/wrist. I've got the elastic wrap too. Let me know and I'll take it out to you next time I walk the dogs.