My day didn’t start bad.

I got up, showered, enjoyed a cup of coffee. Went off to one of my sites and took care of a detail that was left over from the day before. I stopped and filled up the tank before heading back to the main office.

Parking is tight at the office. Our lot only holds a fraction of the cars that bring us there. So I parked in teh lot accroos the street as I usually do. And that was fine with me. The sunny was shining, it was practically warm. I grabbed my laptop and headed towards the office building.

I should pause here to explain something. I have two bad knees. I’ve had arthritis of some sort in one knee or the other (or Fun! Fun! sometimes both of them) since I was four years old. I guess backpacking is a funny hobby for a guy with bad knees, but that is not by accident. I sort of refuse to accept that my knees are shit. I hike, jog, do whatever I want. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know, but I spent to much of my childhood being gimped up, I refuse to do that now. Sooner or later, I’ll probably be forced to slow down, but until then… I’ll keep trucking.

Why am I telling you about my knees, in the middle of a narration about my morning? Well you need to understand that my knees (and sometimes by extension my hips) sometimes rebel against me. And that is what happened this morning.

I stepped on to the curb, to look for traffic, before crossing, but I stepped a little forward throwing my balance ever so slightly off. I should have re-adjusted and not even noticed, but this was just enough to throw off my often useless knees. They gave way underneath of me, throwing me to the street. I put my hands out to break my fall and slammed into the asphalt.

My first reaction was embarrassment. I looked around and luckily there was only one witness and he was a stranger to me. I picked myself and headed towards the building. I inspected my hands as I walked, they were both scraped pretty good and beginning to bleed. My left knee felt as though it had been scraped. And even before I made to the door my left hand was beginning to throb.

I went to my desk and docked my laptop. I went to the bathroom and washed of my hands. Scraped, but not cut deep anywhere. Back to my desk and back to work.

But my left hand was killing me. A bruise was building deep in there somewhere and I was having trouble gripping things. Lifting anything with my left hand was painful enough to make me catch my breath.

I took a half dozen Advil and after a half hour or so the pain faded to a point I could work around it.

I smashed the shit out of the bone in heel of my hand, down near the thumb. I suppose there could be a hairline fracture. More likely, I just bruised the bone.

The only good news is that I have tomorrow off. And with any luck it will be feeling much better by Saturday. Cause I’m going backpacking.

Want to guess at the forecast?