Mr. Leg, meet my dearest friend Mr. Chainsaw. Ahh, nice to finally meet you Mr. Leg!

So, after a few months of no blogging, I found these pictures to be worthy of a blog. These really are pictures of my leg. You may say, "Oh no!", but fear not. It happened last Thursday, so I am pretty much all healed up.

I know that you will all want to know exactly what happened, so here is the skinny. Brother Boman (our generous landlord) and I have been cleaning up his yard. He had a lot of trees that were shading the garden too much, so he wanted to trim them up a little. Well, all was going well, I was really enjoying myself, something about chainsaws and men. Anyway, we had just got started for that day. The particular tree we were going to cut had a fork up about 20 feet. The plan was to cut below the fork, but when I got up there, I thought it would be best to cut one side of the fork off at a time. I cut down the smaller one and then looked up and the bigger side. Much to my amazement, the fork was standing straight up in the air, not leaning. I thought, "Oh man, why am I going to do this, if that doesn't fall on me I will be lucky." So rather than getting down, I decided to start cutting. I made a small cut on the opposite side of the tree to encourage it to fall away from me. Oh, by the way, did I mention that I was standing on the second to last rung on the ladder, 20 feet in the air? Once I had made the cut on the opposite side of the tree, I began cutting on my side. (Keep in mind that the next part of story happens in about 5 seconds). Everything was going well, the limb started to lean out from me, "good," I thought. At that point the limb slid out towards me, taking my saw with it. I let off the gas as the limb crashed into my leg. At this moment I felt the chainsaw running down my leg, I was also saying thanks that I was prompted to wear my double-kneed pants that morning. After the chainsaw quit sliding down my leg the limb lodged nicely in a fork lower down in the tree. I felt a little biting in my leg and I thought, "well, I must have cut myself, but I don't think that it is too bad, I still have everything below the knee." Now, I know the pictures look bad, but it really wasn't that bad. I think that the saw must have just grazed my skin, because the cut was only the top layers of the skin. It is wide, because well, a chainsaw chain is a quarter inch wide. I went to the doctor's office and one of the doctors that I work for promptly stitched me up. I am glad to say that I am doing well. I went on an eight-mile hike the next day.

Moral of the story, don't cut limbs when you are standing on the second to last rung of a ladder twenty feet in the air, especially if the limbs are standing up straight. Second, accidents like these are sometimes good, because they let you know you are alive. Lastly, thank goodness for Carhartts.