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Posted by CDNRatMan
- October 21, 2016, 02:27:27 AM 
I so have questions but I need to get some sleep tonight so in the morning, well later in this morning I'll address my questions........amazing......
Posted by DC
- October 21, 2016, 00:02:14 AMI hadn't really done any yard work since the finger injury. It's doing very well. I think I must be part salamander, as the tissue is regenerating at an alarming rate. The nail bed survived and the nail is growing back. Still, the top of the finger is open without enough nail to protect the bed and I keep hitting it against things. 
Overall, I'm pleased that it should recover 90-95% of what it was before. I went to my family doc as I thought it was infected and he noted the nerve damage. He said the good thing is that the nerves are attempting to regenerate and that I should know over the next 6 months if feeling/sensation will return to the tip. Interesting to note. . . .. When you have nerve damage, the central nervous system attempts to do a repair, by basically regrowing the nerve paths. He said new nerves will attempt to grow and they will start at the spine, travel to the arm, grow down the arm, then wrist, then hand, then start down the finger. If there is enough blood flow and nutrients to sustain them, they will try to replicate the paths the original nerves had.
Anyway, Monday night I thought I would start trying to do some basic yard work. I needed to weed one of my mulch beds in the back yard. With thick pigskin leather gloves, I hacked away and pulled weeds until it was dark. Then, after work Tuesday, it was time to start mulching. I think a lot of you know me well enough by now to know that any project I start will take forever. Part of it is available time, attention to minute details, mixed with a certain amount of ignorance or incompetence. Pick one. . . just one, please.
So I had an enormous load of mulch delivered in the spring. . . maybe 30 yards. I can't remember. I dutifully spread much of it out in the front mulch beds in the next couple of months that followed. After that, summer arrives and my attention turns to other things. So the remaining mulch sat on the driveway. I have a number of mulch beds in the back yard and I was addressing them prior to the finger injury. Fast forward to this week, it was time to resume that activity. Taking up where we left off earlier with the weeding, Tuesday comes around and I'm ready to mulch. So I start filling some large plant containers with mulch and carted them down the hill behind the driveway down to the mulch bed. A few trips down and back, I started thinking . . . "Hey! I have a TLB (Tractor-frontLoader-Backhoe). Why am I not using that?" Apparently, finger injuries have a way of dulling the brain.
So I fired up the tractor and let it warm up. It's really just a subcompact tractor with a 3cyl diesel engine. Okay, it's small, but it can do a lot of work. While it's warming up, I carted down a couple more loads of mulch. . . . . Okay, now it was time to stop poosy-footing (not-related to the Russian girl punk band) around. I drove the loader up to the mulch pile and scooped up a nice large load. . . probably the equivalent of two loads that I could do by hand. I drove down the steep hill, depositing one load after another on the mulch bed, and I was making great progress.
As we get further and further into the Fall, the days are getting shorter and shorter. At this point, I am losing any remaining daylight. Not to fear, my tractor has headlights. Great! I can keep working! . . . . . It's pitch black at this point. Although I point the headlights at the mulch bed, when the bucket is somewhat raised, I really can't see the remaining pile. At this point, I took out a snow shovel to try to consolidate the remaining pile to make scooping easier and more efficient. Returning to the tractor, I raised the loader bucket quite a bit. . . enough that the headlights would light up the remaining mulch pile. I continued to consolidate it by shoveling the mulch into one larger pile. At the same time, I was topping off the load I already had in the bucket, by throwing a few more shovelfuls in.
At this point, my attention returns to consolidating the pile. Some people are obsessed with little things that really, in the grand scheme of things, don't really matter. Is it all that important to shovel the remaining mulch into the some perfect, symmetrical pile, only to be scooped up and hauled away? Still, some people can't help themselves. . . . .
Finally, I consolidated the pile into the perfect pyramid-like shape. . . . . .now worthy of scooping and hauling away. Satisfied and very pleased with myself, I abruptly turned back toward the tractor. . . .
There's something to be said about the correlation between situational awareness and spacial orientation to your surroundings. There's a theorem out there about the laws of the time-space continuum where two solid objects cannot occupy the same space. Dr. Who knows all about this and he gets all preachy if people try to violate, disregard, or otherwise go against this in any way. Sorry Doc. Unfortunately, I never attended time-space continuum law school.
The impact was completely unexpected. It was like 20,000 volts going through my body. It almost felt like I was shot in the head. More precisely, it felt more like I smashed my head into the front corner edge of the loader bucket. . . In fact, that's what I did.. . . . . When I raised the bucket so the headlights would light up the much pile, it put the bucket at about head height.. . . Well, exactly at head height.
As the night air was somewhat cool, it made it more apparent that I had sprung a leak. I felt the warm blood running down my head and onto my face. . . I really hate it when you're working on a project and something goes wrong. Either the tool you need the most breaks, or that screw or nut falls way down somewhere where you can never recover it, and now you're making a trip to the store for a replacement, and the project is on hold. . . . . .Well, not to be deterred, I made one more run with a load of mulch, then retired for the night. I did this last run out of spite, just to frustrate the project gremlins.
I'm a somewhat musical person. I've played guitar for many years. So I know PC (also a guitarist) and other musicians here can appreciate this. Even though the loader bucket had a complete load in it, at the time of impact, I did hear a bell like sound. If I had to estimate, my head hitting the loader bucket rang out a distinctive sustaining C# note. I found this to be unusual, as I would expect the mulch in the bucket to act as a mute pedal on a piano. But no, it rang clear as a bell.
Much as oil and water seek their own levels, there's nothing like a few beers to make everything all better. The bleeding had stabilized after a few eruptions, and I figured, "Well, I might as well celebrate since it was still warm out", not that it was any kind of rational justification to consume mass quantities of inebriating fluids.
I did not feel I needed to seek medical attention for this. I just cracked my head against something quite a bit harder (disputable by some) and it bled for a while. No biggy. Plus, I did not want to deal with the inherent risks of colonoscopy vs. sex change operation.