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one leg, two injuries
Tuesday, July 15 2014
The replacement Brød & Taylor model<> arrived this afternoon and I transferred my incubating fava beans into it. There appeared to be some minor contamination of the beans in at least one spot after being handled so much into and out of the various warm and humid environments, but I can just cut the bad parts away (or see what fun flavors they introduce).
Later this afternoon, I brought a splitting maul with me on my way to retrieve yet more wood from the region near my oak core cache west of the farm road. Normally I only use the maul to split wood directly or to pound wedges into pieces that cannot be split so easily. But today I used its blunt end as a sledgehammer to topple various slabs of bluestone sticking up into the trail like the dorsal fins of sharks. These were the single biggest obstacles to using a handtruck on the Terrace Trail. I made a mistake, though, when knocking off one piece. I struck it hard and it flew horizontally directly into my right shin, where it made a knifelike puncture a half in wide. In the place where it hit, there's almost no flesh across the bone, and it's likely that rock left a permanent scratch in the bone as well. It hurt for a moment, but not as badly as you'd expect given that description. For about a minute afterwards, all I could see was a dark gash with no bleeding, but over time blood began to seap out of the wound and down my ankle in a feathery pattern. I ignored it; going up a third terrace, sawing a long oak core in half, and then toppling the halves down the terrace's short, steep escarpment. As I was doing this with one of the halves, a felt an intense pain in my right thigh. I'd been stung by a hornet. I hadn't thought about the possibility that toppling a piece of wood end over end through the forest put me at a statistical risk of dropping the it onto a hornet's nest. Luckily, I was only stung once, and I was able to sneak back later with a piece of rope and drag that oak core away from where it had last dropped without incident.
In gardening news, I removed most of the old broccoli rabe from the main garden patch, tilled it over, added composted humanure, and then planted lettuce. I also transplanted a large Velvet Leaf (Abutilon theophrasti) that had popped up in the garden and which I'd been allowing to live despite Gretchen's protests. While Velvet Leaf is a weed, it produces seeds that I enjoy eating. I placed it just outside the makeshift garden fence, placing it in a hole whose soil I'd augmented with yet more humanure.
It was good timing to move it when I did, because the rains came yet again tonight, and they continued to fall until nearly dawn.
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