Why you shouldn't peel potatoes while tired...

[khiemtran]

Last night, I went through the usual mad rush to try to get dinner ready in the fifteen minutes between arriving home from work and leaving to pick up Liem. Pot on the stove with a good whack of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt. Chop the garlic and onion, throwing them in as the oil warms. Take a quarter pumpkin, hack it up. Put the chunks in a microwave container with a dash of water. Set for ten minutes and forget. Peel some carrots, chicken mince in the pot as the onion softens. Stir, stir, stir. Chop the carrot, throw it in. What else have we got? Celery? Throw that in too! A dash of chinese wine and a tin of Thai "stirfry" vegetables (baby corn, bamboo, beansprouts and water chestnuts). That's the main course done (or at least on its way). The pumpkin's nearly done. Two minutes left. Get out the potatoes and start peeling. One. Two. Uh oh.

Unfortunately, with my cold hands, I've slipped at the wrong time and sliced through the fingernail on the second finger on my left. Frown pensively as the front half of the nail attempts to separate, despite still being attached to the flesh below. That's ... going to hurt. One and a half minutes left. Rush to the bathroom and fumble for the bandaids. Then back to the potatoes. Peel, peel, peel. Chop, chop, chop. Into the microwave for ten more minutes. They'll be done by the time I get home.

Stir, stir, stir, the chicken and vegetables. Turn off the heat and cover - it can sit there safely on the stove until I get back. Broccoli out of the fridge to remind me to microwave it when I get back. Lights off, close the ibook (obviously, the ibook will be on whenever I'm in the kitchen). Make to the door, then double back again, just to be sure the stove really off. Off again. Dinner done for another night.

The end result is that my finger is still bandaged to try to keep the nail from tearing away and, for the most part, it's proven relatively painless, except when I move it in particular ways and it feels like someone (i.e. me) is trying to tear my fingernail off. I just hope it will grow out in a couple of weeks or so.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Ew! Ew!

We all seem to be in the wars at the moment, what with green_knight's blisters, my strained muscle and your sliced finger.

Perhaps it would be safer to get a Lancashire potato peeler? :)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

On the bright side, the nail did a good job of protecting the rest of the finger. Five billion years of evolution and we have an ape that can escape from a brush with a potato almost unharmed.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, since chips were implicated in your injury and my incident was potato-related, perhaps there's a link here. But I have to be careful what I write - those spuds have eyes everywhere.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

those spuds have eyes everywhere

Howwwl. Ouch. That one hurt.

I find that ripped-off fingernails hurt like hell for the first day and toughen up pretty quickly after that; sometimes the threat of coming off is worse than the event.

Self-experimentation for writers. How to incapacitate a character, part XVIII