and things went downhill from there

I didn't know what to call this post because I have a feeling it might go all over the place before I am done.

Typing is painful for me at the moment because the fingertips of my right hand came in solid contact with the ground yesterday as I was walking home from the (not-quite-local) pharmacy. I was walking with a great deal of caution because there was fresh, wet snow falling at the time and I knew that it would be masking patches of ice. The state of the side walks on our street has become horrible in the winters ever since they stopped door-to-door mail delivery here a couple of years back. It turns out that virtually everybody in our two block stretch only shovelled their walks so that they would get their mail delivered. Other than four houses in our immediate area, nobody else clears their walks now, and when you get a freeze-thaw cycle like we've had over the weekend, it is a bit like navigating through a mine field.

I was just a block from home, and I knew that the state of the walk was pretty poor under the snow. Even so, I was not prepared to put a foot down on one of those frictionless surfaces you sometimes read about in theoretical physics problems. I took a tentative step forward and both feet slid straight out from under me before I could even register that the surface was slick. I managed to get an arm out just in time to prevent my head from smacking on the icy surface, but it came at the expense of bending back the top half centimetre of the nail on my middle finger (and stubbing the rest of them hard enough that they are still painful today).

I put a bandage on that finger when I got home to stem the bleeding, and to help mute the pain (everybody knows that a bandage makes wounds hurt less). The binding must be doing something because the most-damaged finger from the accident is the one that hurts the least today.

Now I come to the reason why I am posting this here, and not on Facebook. Because there are so few of you here, the chances are that I won't get a response. That's okay because for the most part I am just venting about it to help me feel better. Obviously there is still the feeling that I could have exercised even more caution when I was walking, but at the same time I am not convinced that any amount of caution would have saved me there. The sidewalk was so slick that I actually had to roll off into the snow just to get my feet under me again.

I'm not posting about it to solicit sympathy, but if I know if I post it to Facebook, I will get the exact opposite. If I get a response at all, it will mostly be mocking. I'm in pain just now, and the last thing I really want is more of it piled on top.

I know that sometimes people don't know how to respond to a post like that - which is why they added things like sad emoji (or - in the case of many friends/family on there, the laughing one).

On the one hand, somebody might just tell me to trim my list of friends on Facebook and get rid of the repeat offenders (there are 3-4 people who seem incapable of holding a mature conversation). I guess that is an option, but I also don't have a lot of friends on there, and in many cases FB is my only real point of contact with them.

The thing is that I know that the offenders there are good people, but they seem to lose any sense of empathy when it comes to formulating a reply. There are 2-3 who consistently pretend to misunderstand what I've posted, and will respond with herping and derping.

There is the "my experience was unhelpfully different" crowd.

There is the "I'm going to mock you because that's what family is for" crowd.

Me: I slipped and hurt myself today.

Intentionally unhelpful person trying to be funny: You shouldn't do that.
Person purposely playing dumb: Was there ice?
"My experience was different" person: I slipped once, but I didn't hurt myself.
Person subverting my post to show how clever they are: Here is an ice-related pun.
Intentionally obtuse person: Sidewalks can be slippery in the winter.

I acknowledge that I'm being a little thin-skinned about it just now, but to my defence I am in pain, and the acts do get old after awhile. I am a bit saddened that basic human empathy seems to be on the wane. People act like showing sympathy is a sign of weakness.

Anyway, I warned that I would probably wander all over the place with this post. My coffee is done, and I need to try and accomplish something useful with my day - obviously something that needs to take my current, slightly diminished capacity into account.

The cat is staring at me, demanding cuddles. I guess that's a good place to start.

Mornings like this remind me of why people sometimes choose to snipe from rooftops.

I think that Alberta and Saskatchewan drivers exist only to remind the rest of us that there really are people who drive worse than Manitobans.

I ground enough fine-grind coffee this morning to make a full pot of Java goodness at work today, and then forgot it in the grinder when I left for work this morning. I can't use fine-grind at home, so I guess I'll have to bag it up and decent-but-not-quite-fresh coffee when I get in tomorrow.

While I was enjoying drinking a cup of office coffee this morning, I was frantically patching and re-running things that failed overnight because of another network outage that cause two of my Access databases to fail, and one of them to corrupt to the point where I had to restore from a recent backup. When I finally got everything updated, I noticed that one of the reports still had not published. On further investigation I discovered that some moron (possibly me, though I will neither confirm nor deny that) had saved over one of the critical spreadsheets with a different one. It was easy enough, if somewhat fiddly and time-consuming to fix.

On a less grumpy note, I heard a radio ad this morning that made me chuckle. There is a local furniture/bedding company that has these wonderfully low-budget ads (if I say the phrase You'll find us! then all of the locals on my list will probably know of whom I speak). In the ad this morning, the owner of the business was describing a new line of sofa-beds he was bringing in, but he spent more than half of the ad apologizing to his delivery guys because "these things are ridiculously heavy." He mentioned how much he hated moving them when he was a furniture delivery guy himself.

This ad struck a sympathetic chord with me because I vividly remember moving them when I delivered furniture for a living. The only things worse than the sofa-beds were the adjustable beds

( Finally some grumping about WoW, behind a cut of geekery. )