Ahhh, free! Free of tape and free of coban and ace wraps, free of stiff wrist brace!

It was a beautiful spike (which I made) followed by a slightly off-kilter serve (which I still made) that sent a searing pain up my arm on Monday night. I yelped and fell forward hard after the serve, skinning my knee on the sand. Mother-freaking-OUCH! I shuffled off the court before the team even finished the volley. Sticking my hand in the half-melted ice of our beer bucket, I winced. It felt exactly the same as when I’d done it before on my left hand. Twice.*

<swearing prolifically>

I knew what to do without seeing a doctor, and with a $100 emergency room co-pay on the line, I opted to deal with it myself unless it got worse. So I have been such a good girl and kept my thumb and wrist immobilized since Monday night, and now the pain and swelling from my broken scaphoid are pretty much gone. I can grip things without much pain and I have almost full mobility again. All that remains is a splendid bruise from making that spike. I never make spikes.

Doctors (and I) can usually diagnose scaphoid fractures even without x-rays. Often they won’t even do x-rays unless the pain doesn’t abate in a few days. There are key symptoms that set it apart from sprains, chief among them the inability to grip things with the thumb but still with the fingers, and the pain in un-bruised areas like the forearm. The trick most people miss is keeping the wrist immobilized as well as the thumb during those crucial first few days, and failure to do that can actually make a small fracture worse. You may look like you’re overreacting to a jammed or sprained thumb, but seriously – in this case an overreaction is so much better than exacerbating a possible fracture that could lead to six weeks in a forearm cast and/or hand surgery. It’s a teeny bone but a very important one.

So now you have had your anatomy lesson for the day and I am off to wiggle my hand freely as I type up the week-late BlogHer post.

——————————–

* Falling off my bike a few years ago and falling down in indoor volleyball this past December.

Fractured my scaphoid last night – for the THIRD TIME. Twice on the left, now once on the right. So the BlogHer post has to wait. It hurts to type much today.

Back soon!

I must look like the angry, pregnant wife standing over here in this babydoll dress that makes me look second-trimester fat and a pair of ratty Playboy flip-flops, intermittently scowling at him and rolling my eyes.

I’d just walked in five minutes ago and I was already ready to go home and go to bed again. When she saw me across the room, Erica the bartender waved and reached under the bar for a bottle of Bud Select, my usual here. I was too late to stop her before she popped the cap.

“Oops,” she said. “I thought you…”

“Nope. I came to get THAT,” I say, pointing down the bar to where Tim is seated with two girls I don’t recognize.

Erica frowned. “He said Mike was going to take him home.”

“Mike left.”

She looked around. “Oh.” She pushed the open beer across the bar to me. “Take it, on me.”

I don’t drink it but instead head in Tim’s direction. He looks up and sees me before I can speak, and one of the girls glares at me when she sees his eyes light up.

“Hey babe!” he says, a little too loudly. “Thanksh for coming!”

“Are you ready?” I ask. No preliminaries. It’s one o’clock in the morning, I’m wearing a dress I found on the floor and put on in the dark, and I want to go home.

“Lemme finish this beer.” He waves an almost-full bottle at me.

I sigh and pull up a barstool. Tim wraps his arms around me. “I’m so glad you’re here. You’re the best.” He turns to the girl I don’t know. “This girl is great,” he says to her, shaking me by the shoulders and smiling his dopey-drunk smile. “She’s such a great friend.” Then he looks back at me, turns my face toward his with a hand on my chin and looks right in my eyes. “I owe you. Big time.”

“Yes,” I say, pulling away.This is how he looks at me when he wants to kiss me. “Yes you do.”

So I wait it out. He finishes his beer and doesn’t want to leave until I have him by the arm and am tugging him past the pool tables and out the door. He has to get something from his truck. He forgot to say goodbye to someone. He wants to have a cigarette.

“Smoke in the car,” I say, getting in and slamming the door. “Please. Just get in.”

He blows the smoke out the window while I drive. “I’m really sorry,” he says drowsily as he flicks the half-spent cigarette out onto Lansdowne. “I came with Ben. He left to go do something with his girlfriend.” He practically spits out the last word. “He totally ditched me for her.”

“Um.”

“Then Mike said he’d take me home but he left early and I don’t know. You’re like my only real friend.”

I turn onto River Des Peres Road and roll down the window, letting the wind blow on my face to wake me up a bit.

“Twice in a week, though. You can’t keep doing this to me, you have to make sure someone less than twenty minutes away can drive you.”

“I’m sorry. I tried, but Mike–”

“Then leave with Mike next time.” I sigh and stare at the road. “E would not like it if he knew I was out with you in the middle of the night. I don’t want you to drive when you’re drunk but you can’t keep putting me in this position.”

“But we’re friends now. He’s secure, he doesn’t mind me.” He reaches across the console and rubs my arm. I try to shake him off.

“He would mind this. Stop rubbing me like that.”

“You’re just such a great girl, babe,” he says. My lecture has obviously had no effect. “Remember when we…” And he’s off.By the time I pull up to his house, drunken nostalgia has gotten the best of him. “Come in.” He tugs at my hand.

“No.”

“Then gimme a hug.” He leans awkwardly across the console and wraps his arms around me. I sort of pat him on the shoulder. “You really are the best,” he whispers. “I owe you for this.”

He repeats this several times before I can convince him to get out of the car. Yes, he owes me. Again.

I drive to E’s house instead of my own, because I know it’s the only way I’ll feel alright about tonight.

(The Nintendo Girlfriends’ Guide to Gaming post will be up as soon as I get the photos from the girls at Brand About Town. I took very few of my own, as I was too busy gaming and chatting.)

I met a fellow blogger at my Nintendo party the other night! For the purposes of this particular post, she shall remain nameless. We got to talking about – what else? – blogging and the act of moving one’s blog, as I did recently. She confided that she’s moved her blog several times, and one of those times the move was prompted by some Mean People.

There’s a common conception in the blog world that when you start getting trolls, spammers, and the occasional negative “you suck” sort of comment on your blog, you’re on the right track to “making it.” People are noticing you. Your URL is getting hits from bots because it’s getting hits from people. They’re annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, the spammers and bots and trolls kind of mean that you’re moving on up. So we deal with them through Akismet and other filters.

But we should not have to deal with Mean People. Mean People attack us personally and use our comment sections as a place to spew venom and say hurtful things to the person behind the blog. Mean People don’t care if their comments are moderated, they just want to put their vile thoughts on the blogger’s screen so she has to read them before she can delete them.

Mean People need to go back to MySpace with the other rotten, immature teenagers. No blogger, whatever her stance on anything as a writer or as a person, deserves personal attack. Especially in her personal space.

New Blog Friend, I encourage you to take action. I encourage all of us to protect ourselves from Mean People.

Those of us who host our blogs on Wordpress.org can make a quick fix by means of a plugin called WP-Ban. It allows you to ban specific IP addresses from ever accessing your page again, and you can use it to block Mean People as well as spammers and bots. Just copy the IP address on the comments they leave, drop it into a certain text field, save, and you’re done. You can even choose what kind of message you want to show up on the screen when they try to access your domain.

I wish I knew how to do something similar on Wordpress.com and on Blogger. There ought to be something to protect people on every content management system. Mean People are the blogosphere equivalent of the junior high school bully – and should be treated as such. Shut them up.

</rant>

Bloggers, please share so we all know: Have the Mean People gotten to your blog? What platform do you use, and what did you do?

I’ve been working for a few weeks on some posters and other edu-ma-cational goodies for the staff in my department. One of the national regulatory agencies has issued a set of rules we must follow, and my job was to create the various visuals for the education blitz.

There was a lot of back-and-forth about how to word this, how to explain that, until the Powers That Be all finally agreed on the copy and let me have at it with the design work. I was determined to make these things – the posters especially – absolutely professional and perfect. I mentioned to The Boss that due to a lack of appropriate stock photos in my arsenal, I was having a friend from PR come and take some photos in the operating room with me.

“Just make sure everyone is wearing eyewear,” The Boss said. “People keep taking pictures of staff without eyewear and that should never happen.” Duly noted.

My friend and I went into an OR to take the pictures and a nurse stopped us at the door to check that we had our masks and eyewear on. We did, and so did everyone else in the room. After explaining why we were there and getting the releases signed, my friend took some photos of the appropriately eyewear-ed staff and we were done.

I picked out two of the photos and used them on the poster design. They looked perfect. I sent everything to the printer and was hopping happily when 19 big posters were delivered today. The Boss wasn’t in her office, so I left them propped up by her desk.

She calls me.

“The posters look great,” she says. “One thing. Can you come up for a second?”

Doom.

“What’s up?” I ask, walking into her office. She is looking at the poster and biting her lip. “What is it?”

She points at one of the photos. “The girl in the pink scrub cap. She’s not wearing eyewear.”

I squint. “She has to be. They all were.”

“But she doesn’t have goggles on and those masks with the built-in eyeshields have a black stripe. There’s no stripe. The Vice-President and I just noticed it.”

Crap crap crap. How did this happen? I swear to GOD she was wearing eyewear. That was the nurse who checked mine! And now I have violated my sacred charge to make sure that everything we print is compliant with every rule from everywhere.

“I’ll fix them,” I say in a small voice. I want to hide. The Boss shrugs apologetically – she really sympathizes, I know, because she reminds me that she approved the proof, so it’s not just me that missed it. Still. I don’t feel any better. I mentally stamp my forehead with a big “FAIL” and slog back down to my office.

I open the folder of photos and click through until I find the ones from that OR. There’s the girl in the pink scrub cap, not wearing eyewear.

I zoom in. And in. And in.

And there, at 400% magnification, I see it: the glint of a thin plastic eyeshield on a new variety of mask that does NOT have a black stripe.

“I see it I see it I see it!” I yelp to no one in particular, and skitter back upstairs. “She IS!” I say triumphantly, bursting back into The Boss’s office. “She IS wearing eyewear!” I pick up a poster and wave it around.

The Boss picks up her glasses and narrows her eyes at the photo. “Where?”

“That little glimmer. I saw it at 400% zoom. I swear.”

“There?” She points. I nod. Hooray! No need to reprint $800 worth of posters because I made a mistake – because I DIDN’T! Win! The Boss high-fives me and I leave.

“Hey, I’m not so dumb after all,” I say happily to The Boss’s secretary.  “Yay me!” And as I’m speaking, I’m turn toward the doorway and almost run smack into the Vice-President.

“She is wearing eyewear,” I announce, and run away before he can ask me to prove it.

I’ll send him the file.