Punched Myself in the Face, Etc.

As I was laying on the couch yesterday holding an icepack to my face from my injury incurred while putting together some new shelves I bought at our new SuperTarget, I was thinking I could use the time to type out a blog post if anything interesting had happened recently.

Aside from work, things have been pretty tame around here, other than that anyway.

New SuperTarget:

Since we moved into our neighborhood in 2003, we've had to rely on Walmart as our discount-retail-grocery-and-consumables-big-box-chain-store. I hate it. It's dirty and the people who work there are rude. Its only redeeming qualities are the price and selection that come with being a big discount store.

There's a new big discount store in the neighborhood now. The new SuperTarget opened up two weeks ago. I made it in there on Friday after work when I was looking for some shelves for Heather. It's like heaven. I was so excited I was doing S curves with my shopping cart in the big shiny unobstructed aisles. It even has a Starbucks in it. It's clean and roomy and the people are nice. It appears to have all the stuff we used to get at Walmart, sans dirt and bad attitudes.

I'm never going in that stupid Walmart again. I really don't know how it's going to stay in business with the SuperTarget right down the street. I estimate SuperTarget will make my life at least 1.5% better than it was before.

Shelves:

Heather has been couponing for about a month. She's been stocking up on non-perishables when she has a coupon and the item is on sale (it's called coupon stacking). This has resulted in the closet under our stairs looking like we were preparing for the apocalypse. Heather asked me to get some shelves so no one got hurt in a can avalanche.

I got these at SuperTarget for $19.99:


Thank you SuperTarget. I heart you.

Punched Myself in the Face:

While I was putting together said shelves purchased at said SuperTarget, I almost K.O.ed myself.

I put the shelves together and they didn't quite fit under the shelf that was already on the closet wall. Heather asked me to take the top shelf off to make it shorter.

The whole thing fits together without any screws, so you just shove the legs into the shelf and stack. Then, unless you foresee that your wife will want you to take it back apart, you pound on it really hard to make sure it won't fall apart.

I was trying to get one of the legs back out of the shelf and I guess I had my head too close to my hands while I was pulling. When the leg came loose from the shelf, I hit myself in the face with my fist and the shelf leg as hard as I can recall being hit in a while.

This is my nose after it stopped bleeding and I had put an icepack on it:


My unshaven upper lip and nose would be unsightly even it wasn't injured. Noses are really better observed from afar. You also can't capture the full scope of the injury in a picture. It's more on the inside - not, like, emotionally on the inside, but actually on the inside of my nose and deep inside my head.

This blow was minor on the scale of nose blows I've taken in my life, but it still hurt. Since college, I've been more careful in doing the things that resulted in countless nose bleeds and several broken noses. I went so long without taking a good hit to the nose I almost forgot what it felt like. It feels like no other injury. Somehow, your brain knows to numb your nose right after it takes a hard hit, so it takes a while to even feel it. It's an odd and bad type of pain. Being the one who inflicts the injury doesn't help much either. Pain and shame don't go well together.

After I took the top shelf off and hit myself, Heather decided she liked it better with the top shelf on and asked me to put it back together. Too bad she couldn't have just imagined what it might look like without the top shelf.