satanic reverses

Well. It seems I've been dropping off on this a bit, eh? Big annoying news is that J, my wife, has busted her hand. A while ago we acquired a Schwinn Varsity in good shape; I cleaned and tuned it and it seemed to be in good shape. A good deal of time passed, but we finally had a period of time where nothing pressing seemed on deck, so on Friday after work we loaded it into the car and went to the bike oval to let her get a little more adjusted to the racing geometry. Things were going fine, but when cruising around the track she attempted to shift the antiquated crappy deraileur, lost her balance, attempted to brake using the awful, shitty brake extension levers that should be illegal, fully lost her balance, and wrecked onto the grass. The bike oval is directly adjacent to the police / paramedics training grounds, so when I looked up there was a full team of paramedics swarming around us. She stood up and turned down their request for an ambulance, I drove home, and ice was applied to the hand that she landed on. It was swollen, but seemed to have been just bruised. When she noticed that pushing down on the back of her hand produced a visible click, though, we thought it would be prudent to stop in at the emergency room. Four of five hours in the emergency room and an x-ray later, and it turned out that indeed, there was a broken bone. She's got it in a soft cast for now, and with a sling and a prescription for Vicoden, she now has to last out the rest of the weekend until specialists are available on Monday. It makes you thankful for some things (that we have health insurance, that we actually got treatment of a sort rather than just assuming it was a bruise, that she was wearing a helmet and went down on grass instead of the pavement), but there's still a lot of cursing the rotten luck. Why didn't we do this on a Thursday, when if nothing else it would have been easier to get her in a cast? Why didn't I have the forethought to take those stupid levers off the bike? Oh well. The cast should be on for no longer than 3 weeks, which sucks horribly, but, better that than any of the more serious or permanent alternatives.

Otherwise, things are pretty good, but as things almost always are, mixed. I got my sister's old Powerbook with a nice copy of Reason, with which to try to be a little less lazy about making some electronic music with my partner in crime, Bill (good!). When I ordered an expensive RAM chip (bad) to make it a little snappier, Reason suddenly started asking for a CD which I did not have and didn't think to copy when opportunity was there (bad!). I got a whole lot of books from a recent trip to New York but haven't had the time to read anything. The weather has been terrific, and the list of things I have to get done during the nice weather is stupendously long. Long ago, when I was a less well-adjusted fellow, any of those things would be enough to put me in a foul mood. Now, while I can't help being annoyed by the bad stuff, I am acutely aware of just how lucky I am that I have all the good stuff to weigh it out.