I have been slashed, and not in a sexy way.  Rather, something sharp has slashed diagonally up the front of my calf (the leg, not the animal) leaving this black and red furrow.  The really strange thing is that this part is usually covered by the trouser leg, but there is no gash in the trousers, only in my skin.

I am not sure when it happened, but my guess would be sometime yesterday.  It did not hurt at the time, obviously, or I would have looked.  It still doesn’t hurt, not in the least. I can see it but I can’t feel it.  Perhaps the nerve cells in that area are dead from some other reason, or perhaps it somehow evaded them all.  The cut seems to be quite shallow.  There is no sign of serious inflammation around it – the area may be marginally redder, I am not sure.  I had almost felt better if my immune system had taken this a bit more seriously…

Then again, perhaps my immune system would feel better if I took this a bit more seriously, too.  Because I am not really planning to do anything about it. I would if I had discovered it at once, but now at least a day has passed.  With papercuts and similar I have found that if I just squeeze out a drop of blood and keep them dry for a day or two, they will heal completely; but if I wash them, they will hurt and get inflamed and take a week to grow.  I am not sure it is the same here, given that this is much larger, but it does look like it’s scabbed already, so it is probably a bit late to mess with it.

In hopefully unrelated news, I got sick at work today.  Not sick and bored with work, which is surely rampant in this world, but feeling unwell and having a number of gastrointestinal symptoms as well as shivering and extreme sleepiness.  It reminds me a bit of the fat poisonings I have described in the past, although not quite.  It started with a sudden sleepiness, which was a bit of a surprise since I had a good, deep meditation this morning as soon as I woke up.  At this time it was almost lunch break, and I napped a bit in my chair.  Waking up, the rest of the symptoms progressed, until I was shivering with cold and put on my outdoors winter clothes. After this I once again grew unbearably sleepy and napped, waking up feeling pretty good.  Strange episode.

I don’t think I have eaten all that much fat the last couple days.  I did eat something new last night though, a cheaper brand of noodles imported from Thailand by one of our low-price chains.  I really doubt they would make me sick though.  I’m not having any of them tonight even so.  There is only about 10 grams of fat in one package of noodles, but it is palm fat, the unhealthiest  fat you can get except for trans fat.  Usually noodle makers write these as “plant fat”, which makes the casual customer think it must be super healthy like olive oil.  In fact, however, palm fat is worse than animal fats for your arteries.  Buyer beware!

In other news, I broke the bathroom faucet here in Nodeland.  Now the water keeps running until I turn off the main water intake.  In the Mothhouse, the mixing unit for hot and cold water in the shower is broken.  The shower still works, but it is leaking cold water, not gushing but quite a bit more than dripping.  So now I am renting two houses with their water turned off.  That is quite an accomplishment, but not an impossible one for someone who has lived for more than 50 year!  Many strange things can happen in so long a time, don’t you think?  May there be many more years, and I will seek to faithfully entertain you with the strange things as long as I can.