Transformers, twenty years on! And introducing... ►

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And I currently have a few of them. They've been emerging since Thursday evening when I slipped heading across a main road. Not going particularly fast, and I'm not given to falling over much, so I'm guessing it had something to do with oil or gravel. Anyway, the survival instinct rolled me over fully over the kerb and there seemed to be a reasonable gap between that and traffic going past, so I just accepted the situation and carried on walking to Glyn's. Turns out I'd landed mostly on my right-hand side, caning my knee-caps and doing a bit of superficial damage to my hands. On the plus side, my back wasn't stiff any more, even less so after walking around Wolverhampton most of the day afterwards. But I'm jumping ahead a bit… got there and watched Resident Evil (rather comical film) and dabbed at my knuckles and a slightly more irritating incision on the underside of my left hand, waiting for them to clot and restricting the blood flow a bit by holding my left arm in the air.

(This reminds me. I don't know if I ever received a certificate for the first aid course I did last June. One more thing to look for amongst the paper.)

I figured it would be best to wait to look at my knees. I managed to walk (rather slowly) back up the hill later and they'd bled through a bit, but fortunately I hadn't destroyed the trousers. That would have been annoying, since I'd only bought them a matter of days earlier. The flesh over my kneecaps had swelled up to eggshell points, and there was no way either would stop bleeding on its own. Time for my usual reaction to cuts, which is to make sure there isn't anything in them, seal them over a bit with plasters and wait. No sign of bruises and, more numbed than in pain, I figured an early night with my legs stretched out would be a good idea.

Next morning a bit red around the cuts, but the only one which hurt much the whole time was the one on the underside of my hand, which was beginning to fill in with that lattice of gooey beeswax as I began to hope I'd cleaned it sufficiently. Cleaning it the evening before had just meant reopening the thing without getting any perceptible amount of the black stuff away from the edges where it had bonded.

Stuck an extra plaster on my left leg and walked around Wolverhampton for hours, bleeding from the knees. I blame modern plasters that claim to 'let cuts breathe'. A bit slower than usual, coming back up the hill afterwards actually made me feel quite healthy. Perhaps if I walked at that pace more often, rather than dashing around having allotted barely sufficient time for things… hmm…

Rolled right round to about 11am Saturday, enlivened mostly by organising things and then by panicked adrenalin when I realised I'd accidentally overwritten the index page of a subdirectory on someone else's server rather than on the root. For a forum; it would have to be for a forum, wouldn't it? Worked out from clues what was in it and found a version of the file, which worked as a replacement… (As a complete aside, damn vBulletin for having a 'visible source' product they then hide from sight the source of as much as possible. And praise be to Google, which, given a few of the template names I knew had to be in the file, presented me with a full cached copy from a server someone had incorrectly configured to render php. Thanks to those people who didn't set their server up correctly too, I guess. :)

At this point, apparently my sister woke me up from a nap which couldn't have been more than ten minutes' old, asking me to tape something for Mom later. And woke me again much later to ask me questions about the price of a laptop. Here's some advice: any conversation you ever have with me through a door when I've just that second woken up is worth the paper it's written on. It's at this point I also realised I'd left a heater on, contributing to me being asleep a few hours longer than the nap I'd planned. So, figuring my body also wanted more healing time, tidied up and went back to sleep. Woke up a few hours ago and have been reading.

I was talking about bruises, wasn't I? They're something I find very interesting. First of all, they don't really hurt, in my experience. Second, they come in a range of colours. The large patch below my left kneecap is a muted dark purple, leading up to a ring of slightly yellowed normal skin inside which there's a partial scab that is still refusing to seal completely. It's right on the kneecap, so this is quite understandable. Above that there's rich patch of mauve. There are some 'traditional' yellowy bits around the edge, and more of the darkly muted colours on my left knee, but the mauve is particularly striking. I've half a mind to take photos (digital being mercifully free of development costs) but for full effect I'd need some ones from when the damage was fresh with which to compare them in side-by-side panels. Words are simpler.

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