12/14/04’s illustrious band:

Single Handed

Brought to you by accident.

I bruised the side of my hand in martial arts practice last night. No big deal by any means, but when I got home I decided to apply cold to minimize swelling and discoloration. (It worked; there's almost no sign of a mark today.) To do this, I dug into the freezer for the ice pack I haven't needed since my long-ago days of judo study. The pack was much too big, however, and was freezing my whole hand. So I hit upon the idea of covering most of my hand with an oven mitt (the one shaped like a Hawaiian shirt, a gift from the partner I was practicing with when the whackage occurred), exposing only the affected area, and putting the ice pack over that. What can I say? It was 10:30 p.m. and my blood sugar was low.

With the help of an elastic bandage to hold everything in place, I eventually had a paw the size of a tennis racket at the end of my right arm. While it was no mean feat wrapping my smart right hand with the stupid left one, I managed. I then had to complete several end-of-day chores one-handed. Some were easier than I thought they'd be, and some were harder.

Things that weren't too tough to do one-handed:

• Open the mail, including a hermetically sealed box from Mother Media. Thanks for the audios, Mom!

  
  

• Feed the cats. Scoop and dump food into bowls; no problem.

  
  

• Refill humidifier tanks. Unscrewing the caps with the wrong hand took a little trial and error, but not too much.

  
  

• Listen to voice messages. Push the button. Easy.

  
  

• Brush my teeth. This one was hard -- and messy with a mechanical brush -- but doable.

  
  

• Change clothes. Tugging and shrugging did the trick. Turning a garment right side out was difficult, but some creative pinching between my toes got the job done.

  
  

Toughest task: squeezing the Charmin. When you've been right-handed for as long as I have, some habits are really, really hard to modify, know what I mean? Nothing disastrous occurred, but I had to think very carefully about something I normally do automatically. If you're up for a challenge, give this a try.

And that is the extent of my adventures so far this week. There'll be plenty more, however, as I begin serious preparations for hosting my wee Princess and her parents, as well as Mother Media and Princess's other grandparents, at various times during the holidays. Egad, that's just a few days away! What am I going to feed these people?

Today around the world: December 14 is Chingshan Wang's Birthday in Taiwan. Chingshan Wang is a god believed able to cure illnesses. Maybe he can make me a little less ditzy, eh?

E-mail the Media Sensation: BandNameoftheDay@hotmail.com

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