Mind the edge

You know how some canned foods with a pull-top lid have a warning on that lid about it being sharp?

Believe them.

I have a potluck today and was making a batch of Sweet Potatoes Recife. I was trying to carefully drain the crushed pineapple (Carefully-so-I-didn't-lose-any-of-it, not, as it turns out, carefully-to-protect-my-hands) and somehow got my right pinky finger in the way of the edge of the lid at the same moment the microwave beeped, startling me.

I will remark I am always surprised at the capacity a "clean" cut has for bleeding. I grabbed paper towels and wrapped it and applied pressure (Several years ago, I cut my thumb on a paper-cutter - similar type of cut, but scarier, because I thought at first I might have decapitated the thumb). Now I've got the largest adhesive bandage I had on it. It makes typing difficult but at least it does not seem to be bleeding any more.

I presume because it was a clean cut, I put pressure on it right away, and it bled profusely (after all, that cleans the cut), that all I will need to do is keep it bandaged until it begins to heal.

The upside? I'm noticing the bursitis pain (which got worse after spending 2 1/2 hours sitting on one of those molded plastic chairs at graduation yesterday) less.

(The speaker at graduation was very good. He is the mayor of Addison, an immigrant from (I think?) Taiwan (I forget exactly where, I think it was Taiwan). He seems like a very hardworking guy and the bulk of his speech was devoted to the idea that you can get much of what you want in this life, if you set goals and figure out how to achieve those goals. And he also spoke of the importance of being kind, of taking other people into account - which you rarely hear graduation speakers say, and I thought that was a good thing. If I were ever called on to speak at a graduation, part of my comments would be about the idea of being kind, of remembering that the universe does not revolve around YOU.)

He also remarked that if you do something you enjoy, you will always be striving to do it better, or do "more." I thought that was an interesting variant of the "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" maxim (Which really isn't that true, I think: I love doing fieldwork and I generally love teaching, but there are days when it still feels like WORK.) I like his concept better - that if you hold what you do for a living in esteem, you will value it and want to be as good at it as possible.

And I think that could be taken even farther: the idea of honoring and respecting your work, whatever it may be, by doing a good job at it. (And I am reminded yet again of something I read way back in my doll-collecting days, about a convent that elaborately costumed a Mary as The Queen Of Heaven figure - they made incredibly detailed, perfectly hemmed undergarments for the figure, even though no one in the church would ever see them. They did it because, as I think one of the nuns was quoted as saying, "We will know they are there, and God will know they are there.")

***

I still can't believe I'm done for the summer now. Other than the various church-duties today and packing - I have no responsibilities, really, for the next two weeks.

I have a couple more sets of yarn to wind off. I decided to rip back the Genmachai Mitts I started last break - the yarn I had, while sold to me as fingering weight, is NOT - it's closer to a dk (I kept wondering when I wound it off, I should have gone with my instincts). And I couldn't get gauge, except by going down to size 0 needles, which made for annoying knitting plus a very stiff fabric. I do, however, have a green-tea-colored sockyarn that I didn't really have a sock pattern in mind for, so it will become those mitts, and the yarn that I was using, I think, will become the Aegean mitts out of a back issue of KnitScene. (Those mitts call for a sport/dk yarn.)

Speaking of work, though: One of the things I do want to do over break is hit the university library up in Illinois and see if they have any lab-exercise books for ecology or related classes. One of my plans for this summer, when I have some time, is to revamp the ecology labs, discard a few that don't work as well, maybe try to restructure a couple that do to make them better. And maybe work in more "animal" labs, although most of our conservation students tend to get more "animal" than "plant" courses, and as a person interested in plants, I tend to be better at thinking up good "plant" labs.