Rebecca's a lunatic, wasting her time on a lot of silly inventions.

[rebecca_in_blue]

A new NCIS episode comes on this Tuesday, and it's the first of five new episodes in a row that all lead up to the two-hour season finale! I'm so excited that I've been telling everyone I know (Grandma! Josh! Random people!) and soon I'm going to make a list of all the new episodes, their press release summaries, and tape it to our refrigerator. I hope I'll be able to watch them all and won't be stuck at work.

A teacher came into our store this evening to print some papers for a novel unit he was teaching on Wait Till Helen Comes. When I saw the book on the counter (he had the exact same copy, with the exact same cover art, as the one Sara and I had back in the '90s) I actually started exclaiming, "Oh, my God, Wait Till Helen Comes! That book scared the crap out of me!"

Inspired by a similar post my sister made, a list of notable injuries I've suffered in my life:

1. Fell off my bike onto pinecones. I was about six and riding that pink "Puppy Luv" bike I got for Christmas 1990 or '91. (I don't remember having any bike before that, so it must've been my first.) I fell off down the corner from our house and started to stagger home, crying, but some teenage guys offered me a ride in their truck. I remember thinking that since they were wearing Catholic high school uniforms, it was probably okay, so I said yes and one of them lifted me and my bike into the flatbed. When I got home and told Mom -- an incredibly stupid thing to do, in retrospect -- she got really pissed, and I got really pissed back at her because I was all hurt and bleeding and she was just yelling about not taking rides from strangers. See #8.
2. Got stabbed in the foot with a Batmobile toy. I was about eight. Adam and I were playing some game in his room when I jumped off his bed and landed barefoot on his damn Batmobile toy. You'd think an 8-year-old jumping on some cheap plastic toy would do more damage to the toy than the kid, right? Wrong. Maybe because I was chronically underweight as a kid (I probably weighed about forty pounds when this happened) but I didn't even dent the thing. Instead, the wing on the back of the Batmobile (Adam's toy looked a little like this, only smaller, of course, and not so bad-ass) stabbed me in the foot. I wince just writing about this, it hurt so bad. I remember crying and limping to the bathroom and trying to bandage it up by myself. I didn't tell Mom until about twenty minutes after it happened, because I was scared she'd yell at me for getting blood all over the bathroom. I couldn't even wear shoes on that foot for a week or so.
3. Fell face-forward onto the sidewalk. I was about nine. I was at the corner down from our house (underneath a bunch of pine trees), coming home from Grandma's. Ben was a ways ahead of me, and I was running toward him, about to call him some insulting name I'd just thought of, when I tripped and fell. Sara had been running right behind me (trying to stop me from yelling at Ben) and she tripped over me and landed on top of me. I got scabs and stuff all over my face and everyone said I looked like Quasimodo.
4. Fell off my swing. This happened numerous times, from about 1992-2000. Once I fell flat on my back and thought I was going to puke (circa 1992). Once I fell flat on my butt and it hurt to sit down for days. Once I fell and slid on my arm and had a brush burn from my elbow to armpit. Once I fell on my leg, borrowed a cane from Grandma, and limped around for a week (circa 1998). Once I landed on my hands and knees in such a way that my right middle finger slammed right into a live oak tree root -- we had a lot of those in our backyard -- so hard that it got shorter. (See #7. Now both my middle fingers are deformed.) Twice my pinky fingernail was ripped clean off. But the craziest thing is, I kept getting back up on that swing.
5. Burned my arm on my old lamp. I was fourteen and in eighth grade, and I had that really cool blue lamp that I just loved. One night I was lying on the floor doing my homework and it fell forward onto my arm and left a perfectly circular burn. The next day at school (middle school, one of the worst I've ever attended), the kid who sat in front of me in social studies saw it and asked me who'd done it. When I said "nobody," he asked if I'd done it to myself. Writing that might make him sound concerned, but actually he was just a jackhole, like most of the kids in that school.
6. A brush-burn on my leg, courtesy of Sable. I was walking him home from Grandma's, and for some reason I didn't have his leash and had to use a rope. At one point he pulled on it too hard, and it burned my hands and wrapped around my leg. It left this thin line almost halfway around my leg that never bled but just oozed puss for weeks and looked really gross.
7. Bent my finger back. It was around 2004, and I was at mom's house, trying to kill a roach on the hallway floor. I sprayed a lot of Raid on it, but it wouldn't die, so I stomped on it. My foot slipped in all the Raid, I tried to put out a hand to catch myself, and my left middle finger hit the wall and got bent back really far. I honestly think I saw stars. When I told Dad, he said, "As Saddam will you, the poisonous gases need a little time to work." (God, I miss his humor.) That finger is now permanently crooked from where it hit the wall. See #4.
8. Unleased a fountain of blood from my thumb. It was April 2006, and I was at mom's house for Spring Break. I was cutting the tag off a new pair of jeans when the scissors slipped and cut my thumb. It was a very tiny cut, but deep and right along my thumb nail, and it was truly amazing how much it bled. The blood was practically spurting out. I remember that Adam was taking a shower (as always) and when I hollered at him to get out because I needed to get to every inch of gauze we had in the bathroom, Mom yelled at me and told me to leave Adam alone. Some things never change. See #1.