I think my Dad copped to it, though. I don’t care/am not mad. But still. Puncture wounds from a [very] rusty saw hurt like hell.

Our boys also did us proud, with a fire that had an old Christmas tree in the middle for kindling. Seriously, and not a small one.  It was pretty amazing.

As usual when you come home from a camping trip wherein you’re in close quarters with lots of other men, young men and boys, there are people you miss right away and people whom you don’t want to see again for a while, maybe even a long time.  Like Captain M.O.P. (Mullet On Purpose)# whose only words to me all weekend were a racist remark about home buying and neighborhoods that are “dark in da daytohm, too.”*

Not to mention how tiresome, childish and transparent constantly teasing someone about their fucking education is.  It’s not like anyone gave it to me or like I go around judging people without graduate degrees.  Or how insulting it is to be told that you’re “not a real parent” because you only have one child.  Of course, anyone could say that to anyone with less children than he/she has.  That’s mean and stupid.  There was a lot of mean and stupid this weekend, and I might cop to a little of both myself. “Mullet On Purpose” isn’t very nice.

But getting outside is always good for the soul, and we had spectacular weather Saturday for orienteering lessons (with paper, pen and compass, not a GPS unit), for sitting in the shade with coffee and falling asleep for a little while, and for just relaxing a bit.

A gross confession: For the first time in my life, I had an overwhelming urge to poop in the woods, in a hole.  The bathroom was nasty, but there were showers.  How often do you get to poop outside but then get a shower?  I had shower items ready, babywipes (Dr. Dad never leaves home without them!) and guts mustered and prepared.  I was even familiar enough (from 21 years of camping there) with the area to know where I’d not be disturbed.  I was excited by the whole affair.  And then I remembered that I didn’t have a shovel.

Of course, there was one sticking out of the ground in our campsite, I later found/remembered.  (Maybe next year!)

This is a volunteering commitment that I’ve been slowly backing off from just a bit, as it is starting to eat time with my own family.  I don’t want to miss every Friday night with my own kid (wow, still my kid, even though I only have one…) in order to be with other kids.  But I still go, around every other week and to most outings and camping trips.

Camping and hiking are good for me, and I don’t do enough of either.

There are nice walks to be had where I live now, but it’s even better .6-.7 miles up the road, where we’re moving in a few weeks.  Better shade, anyway.

#(My favorite new term, made of sleeplessness/sleepiness/spite.)
*(Baltimorese for “daytime.”)

Okay, I totally screamed like a child — both because it freakin hurt and because I was trying to get her attention to get the hell off of my foot. It didn’t work, so I resorted to banging on her hood. This all happened in like five or ten seconds. She looked at me, said, “Oh!” and took long enough to put her car in reverse and back up for me to think (perhaps outloud), “What the fuck is taking you so fucking long to get your fucking car the fuck off of my fucking foot?!”

She got out, said, “I didn’t see you!” I yelled something like, “You should be looking where the fuck you’re going!”

After the last time I got hurt by someone else’s fault and couldn’t do anything to get them ticketed or at least forced by police to move that pipe, I told her I was calling the cops. She got UPSET. I hung up on 911 and explained to her that I didn’t do it right that time and was going to do it right this time. 911 called me back. I refused an ambulance because downtown Baltimore at 4pm on a Friday is a place where you let the ambulances that can make it through traffic carry people with actually life-threatening injuries.  They sent the police.  The Fire Department came, too.  They were very nice, offered me a lift to the hospital and checked out my foot.  When I told them what happened, they had a, “How stupid can a person be?” look which made me smile.

She had a police sticker on her car, was the only one that talked to the police and told her insurance company (to whom she still hadn’t given a statement Monday afternoon) that she would get the police report.  The paranoid person in me smells something fishy, but I happen to know the boss of that district through work, and I know people who know him better than I do.  With her repeating, “I didn’t see you!” over and over, I suspect she thought I was going to say she hit me on purpose.  That sounds strange, but I can see why she might think that.  But, like I told her insurance company, I don’t dispute that she didn’t see me.  She wasn’t looking at all, and that’s how it happened!

Everyone left, and my family took me to the emergency room.  Had to ride in a wheelchair, and my foot was ballooning.  Turns out that my foot was “trauma-ed” and my big toe broken (fragged, I believe).  I have to see a foot specialist and make sure nothing is forever wrong.  With how I depend on my feet, I would go nuts if this person’s negligence hurt me permanently.  I think she also thought I might be more interested in getting her arrested than making her insurance company pay my medical bills instead of making my health insurance do it.  When I called her insurance company over an hour later, she hadn’t reported a thing.

In Maryland, for what she did, she could go to jail, be fined and get points taken off of her license.  I’m going to suggest that Maryland suspend your license if you injure a pedestrian.

For now, I’m in a boot and on crutches and can’t put any weight on my foot at all.  As you can imagine, crutches are a lot of fun when your wrist is broken.  On the other hand, they gave me very strong pain killers, so I can get to sleep.  I always wake up with sore hips from being knocked out by drugs hard enough to not move, though.  I’m working from home and haven’t left my apartment since Saturday.  This blows and hard.

So my new bike is getting returned.  I bought it quickly because it was a good sale.  I thought I’d be riding, at least a little, by the end of next week, if not sooner.  But now, when I can ride again is undetermined.  I’m flirting with being depressed, and I can’t look at that thing knowing that the carelessness of one person might keep me off of it for more weeks or months.  I can always buy it again later.  There’s something fun about getting to actually ride your new bike that I keep missing and would like to get to do.  So I get a do-over here.  Screw the sale.

The other fun thing is dealing with an insurance company who is acting that this could in any way by MY fault!  They even asked about my shoes (Tevas) and commented that it was the only protection I had — like we should all walk around in warm weather in armored boots so the negligent drivers of the world can run us over with impunity.

I think I might have to get a lawyer.