Spilling my Type B+ blood

We're back from about three hours in the NEA Baptist Hospital emergency room where a doctor from Indiana repaired the damage I did to myself with my Swiss Army knife.
We bought a patio table (some assembly required) yesterday at Lowe's in Paragould so as to have a suitable dining space on the screened back porch.
I decided to put it together this afternoon and discovered, to my chagrin, that the Third World wage slaves who packed the parts, went completely nuts with the bubble wrap and shrink wrap. I was down to the fourth and final leg, hacking away with my pocket knife when I made a stupid move and put a 1½" slash to the outside of my left wrist.
I thought for a moment that I'd only knicked myself until I noticed the blood - lots of it, running down my hand and dripping onto the concrete porch floor.
I pushed the back door open and yelled, "Help!" loud enough for Maria, who was working in the upstairs office, to understand immediately that something serious was afoot.
We flushed the cut with tap water in the kitchen sink and wrapped my wrist in a couple of clean dish towels, secured the dogs and headed for the ER.
This being Memorial Day, the ER waiting room was packed with other hapless fuck-ups who couldn't get through a holiday weekend without hurting themselves.
The most interesting of the bunch was a guy with a nail sticking out of his left bicep about three inches above the elbow - an obvious casualty of a nail gun. He was jabbering about wanting to pull it out but being afraid it might have hit an artery. He opined that he could cauterize it with a welding rod.
There was a guy with a cane who looked like Snuffy Smith from the comics page who was there with his fat wife. We think the wife was the one with the problem. She seemed very agitated and rocked back and forth in her chair. They apparently got tired of waiting because they left after about an hour without being seen by a doctor.
There was a teenage girl whose left wrist was bandaged like mine, but with the added feature of an ice pack, leading us to suspect a sprain or possible fracture.
An older couple was there with their young grandson who had somehow got poison ivy or poison oak all over his groin and privates. They left without being seen too, announcing they were going to a drugstore to see what a pharmacist could do for the boy.
It was a mildly entertaining way to spend three hours on a Memorial Day afternoon, capped by seven stitches.
And I left home without my cell phone, so I don't have any gory pictures to share.

May without "500" festivities

How odd to not be in Indiana during the month of May and the run-up to the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race.
Here's a photo I shot of race driver Dan Gurney conferring with his pit crew during practice for the 1969 race. He finished second in that year's Indy 500.
Gurney, now 77, is still active in racing and is almost certainly in Indianapolis right now, awaiting Sunday's race.
My earliest recollections of the race are from the late 1940s or early '50s when we would listen to the start of the race on the car radio while taking coffee cans of peonies to the graves of my parents' families.
I attended my first Indianapolis 500 in 1964. I listened to the 1967 race on a telephone headset, taking dictation from Indianapolis News Sports Editor Wayne Fuson for the paper's running story of the race. We prided ourselves with having the final race edition of the paper, with a complete story of the race and the winner's photo on the front page, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway before most of the crowd had left the grounds.
That was when the race was held on May 30, regardless of what day of the week it was. Since The News was a Monday-Saturday paper, the decision to hold the race on Sundays took us out of the game. We hated it because it was the highlight of our year.