flies and my finger tip....

Do you remember Nancy and Sluggo?

If you don't then you're too young to understand 'Truth, Justice and the American Way...."

Nancy and Sluggo were the characters in a comic strip. One I remember after all these years has Sluggo telling Nancy why he loves winter: "No hot days, no sweating, no mosquitoes or gnats or flies..."

Then snow falls out of a tree and covers Sluggo and Nancy says, ...."no Sluggo...."

I do hate flies.

I kill six or seven a day and Bern does as well....

Then I almost cut the tip of my ring finger off on the lid of a pull off can of artichoke hearts. I hate pull off tops and am always afraid I'm going to cut myself. I was holding the can in my left hand and pulling the little pull tab with my right hand and suddenly the can was open and I was bleeding all over the counter top and in the sink and on the floor.

I could tell from the copious blood that it was a bad cut but I couldn't stop the bleeding to see how bad it was. So Bern gave me a bag of ice and I pressed it against the cut and wrapped it in a kitchen towel and she drove me to urgent care about five minutes away.

I know all about finger cuts since two thanksgivings ago I started to open a drawer to get a spoon and the antique glass knob shattered and cut my right index finger so badly I need  stitches and only now can bend it fully. That day my friend John and my daughter Mimi took me to the Mid-state emergency room and it took an hour and a half and Mimi kept taking pictures of the stitching on her phone and sending them to Tim to show Bern and Hanne, who were at home waiting for dinner.

This time Bern took me and couldn't stay in the room because she has this thing with blood, but I got four stitches and we were home in 40 minutes.

(Bern's blood thing looks like this: once Mimi who was 2 1/2 cut her head in our house in New Haven and it bled like all forehead wounds do, so Josh, 5 1/2, called me at the church and said, "Mimi is dying!"

The church was next door and when I got there in a few minutes, Josh was still screaming about his sister's demise, Bern had a dish towel over the cut and told me to press hard, then she fainted dead away, luckily she was sitting on the floor and hadn't far to fall. Then Josh started screaming, "Mommy is dying!".... Bern's 'blood thing' is like that....)

The ring finger types the letters: swq2 and x and any time I've had to type 'w' it's come out w3e or something like that so to write this I've done lots of deleting and backspacing....Just want you to realize how hard I've had to work--with a bum finger and all.....