First Blood

7/10/09
It didn’t take long for the wild to bare its claws. I stopped for dinner at a rest stop along I-97 and had barely begun to arrange my stuff on the picnic table before I caught a nasty splinter deep in my finger. I proceeded with my dinner, barely avoiding taking in a couple more splinters - this table was a menace - and then broke out my new first aid kit for some tweezers. I worked for a while trying to tease the splinter out but without success. So I returned to the first aid kit for the accompanying booklet to see if it had any wisdom on splinter removal, and there it was: do not try and tease the splinter out. Instead, use the tweezers to remove the tissue from above the splinter area. Tissue? They meant I should tear my skin off. Egad. But I buckled down to do it and my skin came off surprisingly easily - like tissue? - and then I just plucked the stick of wood out from the little bowl of bloody mucous, applied a dose of triple-disinfectant salve, wrapped a band-aid around it and heh! - I had risen to meet my first challenge - executing a proper and successful splinter removal operation.