I had originally planned to write this post much earlier in the day. And I also planned to randomly pick a word out of the dictionary that struck me as interesting, or a bit uncommon, or maybe not used much anymore, or whatever other reasons for picking it I could ascribe to it so that I could discuss it.

Instead, I used a chopping knife rather than a bread knife on a stale hunk of Calabrese.

My post-lunch plan was to whack the aforementioned half-loaf into pieces, throw it in the VitaMix and whirl it into bread crumbs for the freezer.

This accomplishes a couple of things; 1) I love having a ziploc freezer bag full of breadcrumbs for use as a toasted garlicky topping on pasta or bean salads or wherever one could suddenly need bread crumbs for, and 2), it makes me feel virtuous and Mennonite for not wasting stale bread.

But when I cut the first piece it occurred to me that it would actually better suit being made into croutons, so I decided to cut it into thick slices and then cubes for browning. This then, was my plan. And a damned fine plan it was.

By the third slice I determined that the bread really was stale and I should probably use a bread knife instead. It was at that precise moment that the knife did a wild skew sideways and chopped into the middle finger of my left hand.

So my word today is smite. One definition of smite says, to strike sharply or heavily esp. with the hand or an implement held in the hand.

Kevin wasn’t sure if I needed stitches. There was a lot of blood. I withheld my opinion as I refused to look at it without wanting to fall to the floor. We agreed on the Emergency room.

The doctor felt a couple of stitches would help it heal. “Is it entirely necessary?” I asked. Well no, she said, you could get away with not having stitches but then why did you come to the hospital?

A fair question. I went because I wanted a professional opinion and the way I understood her, it sounded like it wasn’t completely necessary. I just wanted assurance that just taping it up would suffice. Not to mention that I seem to have been in the Emergency a few too many times for other stitches to other digits for the same type of accidents, and quite frankly, the needles and the stitches are worse than the original severing of the flesh.

All this to say that the almost two hours spent waiting for that diagnosis and the subsequent wait for the dressing kind of cut into my computer time. No pun intended.

But the waiting served another purpose. I had plenty of time to think and when I got home I had one of my most productive writing times all week. I’ve laid down most of a new story and because the wound is on the top of my middle finger, it doesn’t affect my typing…not to mention that I got to use smite in a sentence.

Doesn’t get much better than that.