Ouch!

Yup, I've been pretty quiet here lately. To be honest, that's mostly because I've been busy, and just more interested in teaching than in telling about it. But I suspect there will be a proper update soon. However, today I want to write about a little incident from yesterday. We were having a pep assembly, mostly to cheer on the wrestling team as they head to the district meet. As is often the case, there was a little class competition. This time, they picked the class advisers to take part, which meant that I was one of them (I'm one of the senior class advisers this year). My co-adviser chose not to be there (wise move), so I did it with one of the seniors. All we had to do was get our legs tied together, crawl down to the other end of the gym on our bellies, drink a root beer and eat some ice cream — no spoon, of course — and head back. I got the ice cream, the student took the root beer. No problem, although the banana in the ice cream was a surprise. We came untied during the crawl, and it sort of became a free-for-all, but we made it, and headed back. I got left in the dust and made a comic attempt to catch up. As I neared the finish line, however, WHAM! I misplaced a foot or something and fell flat on my face. I lay there for a bit just to assess myself, and sure enough, I got hurt. Not bad, but it wasn't pretty. I landed right on my nose, which tends to bleed at the least little thing, and this was not a little thing. Sure enough, I realized I had a bloody nose after a couple of moments. Someone rushed and got me a paper towel, and it actually didn't turn out to be too bad, although I'm sure it looked bad from the stands. I also realized my nose hurt, I'd bumped my lip, and my knees stung, probably skinned. I finally hobbled out to the office to get cleaned up and nursed back to health, all to the students chanting, "Gjo-vaag, Gjo-vaag, Gjo-vaag." (I'll be honest, I even limped a little bit more than I really had to.) I lay in the nurse's office for a bit just recovering and assessing myself, and let my nose stop gushing. I felt better after a bit and cleaned myself up, but decided that I was done for the day. This being a Friday, the students went home early so the teachers could have some time for professional development, but for once I decided not to avail myself of that.

The final verdict was a bruise on my nose, a big old blood blister on my inside lip, two scraped knees, one scraped elbow, and a generally sore shoulder. Fortunately, the bruise is small, my nose is already feeling better (but still definitely tender), my blister has all but receded, and my scrapes are better. The shoulder is still bothering me a little, but even then I was able to do my ironing just fine today, and that little bit of a workout seems to have helped. I'm going to be fine, but I'm still going to fill out the accident report just to be on the safe side. (In the line that asks who witnessed it, I can truly say, "The whole school, and the superintendent.")

I am also going to milk this with my students for as long as I can, but I give that a week at the outside.