One of these days I'll learn. I just hope I don't cut my finger off first.

Tonight I just sliced it a bit while I was chopping up an onion. I guess I was a little careless, because I was doing it while watching both the Giants game and the American Idol finale (thank you, picture-in-picture). Also, I hadn't turned on any lights yet and it was starting to get dark.

So I had a whole lot of factors working against me, and I probably shouldn't have had a knife in my hand at all. I guess I got lucky. I came out of it with all ten fingers more or less in place. The two little fingers have both been broken and don't bend quite the way they should, but they do their job. One of them was just where it shouldn't have been when the knife slipped.

This started out as one of those days when something bad was bound to happen, so I guess I should be grateful it was only a little spume of blood. I woke up in a bad mood, and then I had to go to work right away, typing and retyping a letter that I wished I could have rewritten. I didn't like the tone of it, and if I'd been writing it, it would have sounded a lot nicer.

It probably would have produced better results, too, but it dealt with one of those areas where I don't have a say. If it had been a letter to someone who knows me, I would have made a few revisions of my own. I couldn't do it this time, though. This letter was to a landowner whom we're trying to lease property from. Way out of my jurisdiction, so I kept mum.

That's how my day started, and it ended with me trying to open a fabric bandage package with nine fingers, because the tenth was leaking. It also ended with me cursing the packagers of fabric bandages.

Everything that happened in the middle was pretty tame, compared to the beginning and the end.

Why was I chopping an onion in the dark? You see, I had all this leftover cooked chicken, and I wanted to try making chicken salad. I should have checked to see if I had enough mayonnaise before I started chopping stuff like onions and celery (and chicken, for that matter). I had to improvise. I used soft cheese to fill the gap when I ran out of mayo. It seemed to work all right, but there was something funny about the way the onion tasted.