Shades of my Father

Tharsis slipped off the monitor while I was petting him. I tried to catch him, but Tharsis is a pretty skookum cat and while I did catch him. I hit my arm against the corner of the desk pretty hard. I hit the bone on the inside of my forearm just past the elbow. I don't recall ever having hit that particular part of my arm on anything before. It was, shall we say, a unique sensation - sort of a cross between hitting your funny bone and getting kicked in the shin. Oddly, it hurt just a little for a second, then very quickly ramped up to hurtinglikeasonofabitch. The tendon for extening your little finger, I discovered, runs across this spot. For a few minutes my little finger curled up and refused to uncurl. Elaine got me a bag of ice and it's help. Problem is, I have chronic tendonitis so this is going to be, quite literally, a pain for a while.

Tharsis sat by the couch looking genuinely concerned and has been glued to me since. Very cute.

Being injured by a house-cat reminds me of an incident where my Dad's 12 lb terrier, Pepper, managed to knock my father who weighed about 40 times the weight of the dog at the time (for the mathematically chanllenged, that's 480 lbs). My father was by no measure a small man. For those old enough to remember tin beverage cans (edbook, seymour_glass?), I can remember him making the pull-tab pop off by squeesing the cans when they were full. And empty he could crush them not with a fist, but just with his thumb and forefinger. He could hold his arm out straight and I could, as a fully-grown teen weighing 195 lbs, hang from his wrist. I've seen him hold a couch at arm's-length, from the end. Try that with a kitchen chair, let alone a couch. With that established, on with the story: We were in his shop talking one day. He was leaning in a doorway as we talked, with his weight on one leg. Pepper, who was a very excitable dog, came skittering up, wanting Dad's attention who knows what reason. He leapt up against Dad's leg to get his attention, unwittingly hitting him in the back of the knee. Dad lost his balance. Dad, of course, tried to hold onto the wall to prevent his fall. Unfortunately the wall was a flimsy interior wall that bore no load and was not designed to be tugged on violently by nearly a quarter ton of human. Dad and the wall came down. Pepper narrowly avoided being crushed that day (and lived to a ripe old age). It took Dad and I two days to repair the wall.

I'm going to stop typing now before my elbow gets too achey.