Ouch!

Last month, on Sept 8th to be precise ( I blame this for being late on all my September birthdays!), I had a slight accident.
I was wandering around my house. I wasn't wearing shoes, 'cause I don't like shoes. But I was wearing socks, apparently slick socks. I was upstairs, and about 3:15 I decided I should go check the mail. So, I jumped up, and went to go down the stairs...
I somehow slipped on the edge of the first "triangle stair" on the bottom two stairs... And landed on the linoleum (not tile) on my foot. My entire body fell two stairs and landed solidly on the outside of my left foot. I was in a LOT of pain. So, I laid there on the floor and cried. As soon as I was thinking more clearly, I realized I needed to get ice. And ibuprofen. So I crawled across the floor to our kitchen and got ice and pills, crawled back to the living room and put my foot up and iced it, while crying. I wasn't sure if I had broken it, or just sprained it, but it definitely was painful and swollen...

By bedtime, I could almost hobble around a bit. But I couldn't flex or extend my foot, curl my toes, or anything. But I called my nurse sister (and she gave me sympathy and listened to me cry for a while) and then later my mother, and they both said the same thing: See if it gets any better by tomorrow, but if you still have circulation to your toes it's not an emergency. :)

The next day I could almost walk on it. It would hold my weight, but not bend, so I hobbled... luckily, I had a doctors appointment that day, (convenient, huh?) so I just talked to the doctor about my foot then. She said that while she could have my foot x-rayed if I wanted, she didn't think it was broken. I wasn't in terrible pain when she touched it, except for one tiny spot, and I could put pressure on it. But there apparently wasn't enough bruising and what bruising there was, wasn't in the right place.
(This is not my foot, but a foot picture I found online. I forgot to take a picture of mine.) The orange "circle" is where my foot was bruised, and the blue is where the doctor said the bruising would be "more likely" to be if my foot was broken.

However, she couldn't tell me for sure that it wasn't broken without an x-ray. I opted to not do an x-ray and just wait and see.

By my logic, it already felt a little better the next day, and if it wasn't broken it would continue to get better. If it was broken it would still hurt in the next few days.
By the next week, I could walk normally, but slowly. The week after that I felt just fine. Fine enough I decided to mow the lawn. BIG mistake. I stepped in a hole and torked it again. So I was back to limping around for a few days.

Anyways, that's my foot story... I fell, hurt my foot, but I'm better now! Stupid dangerous stairs!
I never did make it to the mailbox that day...

PS: I'm a bit paranoid about going down my stairs now, so I'm much more careful! Except when I'm not!

House pictures...

I've heard that some people like to see where other people are living, to be able to picture them in their environment better...
That said, my environment is typically fairly cluttered. I'm a messy kind of girl and while I am working on it, the "tidy up goal" is still a work in progress. One day, I'll have everything in my house in a place of it's own... (Yeah right, but it sounds good!)
A while ago, I said I'd take some pictures of our house:
Front of the house...
Back of the house... We have since removed the window air conditioner units and the foil from the window. Apparently it was violating the homeowners association rules... For the sake of not complaining about it (today anyways), I'll just say HOAs (for the most part) are evil, rude, and invasive.
Our view out our back, this was me standing in my back door, on my step stool, so I could see over the back fence. There's a park back there, in the next neighborhood over. Just past this fence is a drainage canal with lovely smells and animals in it. (Some animals are actually lovely, others... not so much! Story for a different day.)
This is our living room. Couch, bookshelves, TV, and speakers. I'm sitting on the stairs, on the right side of the picture is the front door... It opens right against the bottom stair. Makes it hard to move stuff in and up the stairs, too!
This is our living room. As you can see, we don't have a dining room table.
And to answer a question that people seem to want to know... We don't usually use either the weight set or the elliptical. But we wouldn't ever use them if they were in the garage, so this IS a step in the right direction, right?
This is the kitchen. Through the door frame across the way is the laundry room and a door to the garage. And I'm thinking of it just now... There is a half bath down stairs, it's located just to the left of where this picture ends (does that make any sense?), tucked under the stairs.
Here's the bottom of the stairs... This is the dangerous part! But I'll save that story for a different post!
This is the view of the stairs from the top. (I've got a ferret story about this...)
This is the view of the upstairs from the big room at the top of the stairs. On starting from the left: We have our bedroom (with our bed, dresser, and a closet with Hal's shirts in it), the next "door" just above the vent is the AC/furnace blower closet door. The next room is our computer room (with a door to the bathroom and a big closet with my shirts, pants, etc, in it!). Then ther's the staircase. The last door you can see is the door to the ferrets/frogs/turtle (and fish) room. There's another bathroom right by the ferret room.

I'm afraid ya'll don't actually get to see the contents of any of these rooms at this time... it's too embarrassing... (as I mentioned I'm kind of a slob... working on that... I'll get things tidied up and post upstairs pictures soon!)

There's some of the pictures of our house. And what do you know?! I came up with three stories to post about just from looking at the pictures!

Hal's new blog

I've been posting for about a week on a new blog, so it looks like I'm serious this time. The new format is less restrictive for me. I don't feel like I have to have a whole set of pictures before I can post. Also, being on blogger means the process is simpler and faster. Check it out if you want, and leave a comment over there so I'll know if I've got an audience. It's not just pictures this time. This blog is also going to have my musings sometimes, current events I want to comment on, things I find funny, etc. Also, when I post pictures they'll be right on the front page instead of in a Flash program. Here's the link:

hatchingchickens.blogspot.com

I've established a separate blog so that I don't make a habit of posting on halanddani. I don't want to muck up Dani's blog with my own stuff, and you can ignore one of us or the other as you please.