That was a lot of blood!

If you’re squeamish, do not scroll down or read further.

The Bantam A team I’m helping out this season had a full-ice practice last night but only one goalie, so I threw on my pads and took a net.

Aside from the incredibly tiring effort that it takes to face shot after shot after shot (repeat 150 times), it went well. I was too tired to drag my gigantic goalie bag into the house when I got home so I left it for this morning.

This morning, around 9;45, as I was hauling my bag over the raised threshold of our front door, the plastic handle of the bag snapped. One sharp edge sliced a joint of my poor left forefinger. I dripped a considerable amount of blood into the sink while Elvi bandaged my finger with gauze and tape. That seemed to stop the bleeding, so we went to to brunch with my mom, who’s visiting this week.

We got home before noon and I decided to check out the wound. Upon removing the tape and gauze, my finger started pouring blood again. I got Elvi to patch it back up and off to the emergency room I went.

In triage, the nurse wanted to look at the cut. I told her to bring over a garbage can because I was going to bleed all over her office otherwise. Good thing she listened to me.

A doctor finally saw me around 4:45. He took the triage nurse’s bandage off and, yes, blood started pouring out of my finger again. There was no way he could see inside the wound to check for damage or sew it up without stopping the flow of blood. The first thing he tried was to put my hand in a rubber glove and roll back the glove finger of my wounded finger so that the tight roll would form a sort of tourniquet. As you can see below, that didn’t work.

What did work, finally, was using a strip of the rubber band normally used on the bicep for IVs. I would have a pic of that, but my phone ran out of battery. In all, I lost about half a cup of blood. That pool of blood in my palm inside the glove clotted into a cool jelly-like mass.

I have no tendon or nerve damage, but I do have four new stitches. I did almost throw up, but only after the doctor had finished all the sewing. There’s been surprisingly little pain after the original slice.

Bonus pic:

Either, Eller

Morgan Rielly’s temporarily tying goal lies on the shoulders of Lars Eller, but not because it bounced off his torso and trickled through Carey Price’s five hole.

Eller had two decisions to make before Rielly got near the puck, and chose unwisely both times.

(Pardon the screenshots with the faded play button in the middle. I’m not patient enough to wait for this to appear on YouTube so I used the NHL highlight.)

Fifteen seconds before deflecting the puck into the net, Eller took control of loose puck along the left boards in the defensive zone.

He makes his first poor decision in choosing to swing in front of his own net instead of taking the puck behind it. Taking the puck behind the net, he has aÂ potentialÂ outlet pass on either side or can run a set play. By taking the puck through the slot, he boxes himself in between the two forecheckers and his net. The Maple Leaf players can predict hisÂ path in the short term becauseÂ he can only keep skating left.

The Leafs see this and block Eller’s further movement rightÂ and canÂ interceptÂ any pass to PK Subban. Eller must take the puck behind the net now, but the pursuit is much closer than it was when he first picked up the puck.

Ever since both Leafs followed Eller, Alexei Emelin has been standing all alone. He sees Eller swing around the net and prepares to accept a pass they will lead to an easy breakout along the left with three Leafs in on the right side. Eller, though, is fixated on Subban and looking back at him. Eller never sees Emelin.Â Eller instead dishes the puck backwards along the boards to Subban, his second major error. It’s not a strong pass given that he’s skating hard in the opposite direction.

By the time Subban gets the puck, aÂ Leaf is on him and another is about to join the scrum.

The Habs lose possession of the puck, which will eventually lead to the tying goal.

I have been retired from coaching the kids so you’ll have to put up with me doing this. Sorry.

Bonus update:

Here’s the video.

Seriously, Apple (Store)?

I just got off the phone with David, a genius – well, an Apple genius. Let me backtrack….

I hadn’t heard about my expected two to three-day repair by Friday so I called the Apple Store, twice. The tinker geniuses were too busy to call me back so I made do with a receptionist genius. He checked my file to see why my repair was taking so long.

He told me that the store was waiting for delivery of a replacement video card. Apparently, that had died. He assured me that my comatose iMac would need both a new logic board ($708 after tax, remember) and a new video card (cost unknown).

I’d been biding my time, taking advantage of my kids’ absences to use their computers to do work and stay in touch with the world. A replacement used iMac, according to my research, would have cost $700, give or take $100. (In my research, I discovered that you can find the best deals on Kijiji.) I would have much rather kept my repaired iMac than risk buying another. But if the cost was rising to $800 or more, I would bite the bullet and pull the plug on my old machine.

As I was looking for replacements on Kijiji Saturday morning, a near clone of my machine popped up. The only difference was that mine had a better video card. I quickly decided I could live with that downgrade for the $400 it would cost me.

I owned it by 1:00 p.m. The case is a little dinged but it’s otherwise perfectly good. It was good enough to let me surf to that Kijiji page and find one of these on sale for $700. Wow! Faster, bigger, better.

I could not pass that up. I bought it this morning. I can always sell the one I bought Saturday at a profit so my net would be a faster machine with a much bigger monitor at an outlay (after reselling the first one) somewhat less than $700.

Yeah, so I just got off the phone with the genius David. It turns out that the problem with my original iMac was the power supply. They discovered that the replacement power supply they tried was faulty. My Mac is up and running but they want to test the hard drive because they think it might fail. If the hard drive is fine, I can have my old machine back for the $160 cost to repair.

Right now, I am out $160+$400+$700=$1,260. But if I succeed in my self-appointed mission, I will earn back $800+$700=$1,500 by selling my old iMac and the first used one I bought at market prices. That $240 difference will either be profit or pay for a new hard drive and a new backup hard drive (my current one is only 1 TB which is not enough to archive a 1-TB drive through Time Machine).

And I’ll have upgraded to a monster.