Di and I walked into the College Dining Hall and I reached into my pocket for my University Card. It wasn’t there. I checked the other pocket.

“Where’s my card? I had it in my hand!” I vividly remembered taking the card out of my wallet. “Did I drop it?”

“No,” Di assured me. “There’s no way you could have dropped it on the way. Don’t worry, it’ll be sitting on your desk at home. I’ll pay for you tonight.”

I knew she was probably right. I’m very absent-minded. I could have easily taken the card out and put it down straight away without realising it. But I could have sworn I had been holding my card…

We finished dinner and started walking back towards our house, which is a few minutes off-campus. Di was saying something but I wasn’t fully concentrating because I was scanning the footpath for a flash of white plastic. Luckily or unluckily, I didn’t see anything.

A taxi was waiting for Di at our front door when we arrived.

“See you later!” she said, as she hopped in.

I hurried upstairs to search my room. My eyes darted to all the obvious places. No card. I rummaged through my coats and the papers on my desk. Oh no. Please, no. I had already lost my watch this week.

I was miserable. Di had been wrong. I was such an idiot.

But the misery only lasted three minutes because I did find my card! Do you know where it was?

It was in the back pocket of the jeans I was wearing!

1. Donate 470 mL of blood.
2. Don’t have dinner.
3. Go to a wine tasting.

You know that little bit of wine they put into your glass for tasters? Three of those later and I was the closest to being drunk as I’ve ever been.

Save three lives! Then get smashed.

One of the things I re-learned about myself while in Brisbane is that I’m a klutz.

We spent much of the time doing building surveys. I picked up the knowledge part pretty quickly (“Bathroom? Check the partitions. Laminated cement sheeting, I see. Could be Tilux and contain asbestos fibres.”) but when it came to sampling the material, I reverted to the Primeval Klutz.

Awkwardly holding my shiny new hammer and chisel, I would timidly tap at the sheeting, barely making a scratch in the wall. Or, as it happened once, gouging a big hole in a verandah awning (“Wah! I made a hole!”).

I would spend many minutes trying to angle my pliers so that I could twist off a bit of sheeting.

I’m so clumsy when I have to do anything practical.

This is why I’ve decided to take up woodwork.

This Christmas holiday, I’m going to obtain some wood and begin making something. I don’t know what. I think I’ll have to visit the library.

I am a climber.

I never stand on escalators. I always climb.

This morning, as I climbed the escalators from the station, I tripped and fell forward onto my hands. It must have been a spectacular fall. I pushed myself up and stepped off the escalator. No one said anything. My recovery must have been convincing.

It hurt. It felt like the hurt from the impact from falling — tingly pain that would go away when I got used to the idea I wasn’t injured.

I kept walking and by the time I was waiting at an intersection to cross the road, I was wondering why the pain hadn’t gone away. I looked down at my heeled sandals. A flap of skin was hanging from my left toe.

A scrape! So I wasn’t unscathed. That explained the pain. I lifted my toes from the sandal and saw a pool of blood sitting in the shoe. Oh. This looked bad. That was a lot of blood.

As I stumped across the road, I wondered what to do when I got to work. At high school, I would have gone to the nurse’s office. There was no such place at work.

The problem was solved when I pushed the glass doors to enter the office. Margaret, our company’s librarian and the most grandmotherly figure I know, greeted me.

“Margaret, I fell!” I replied.

She accompanied me to my desk, sat me down and took off my shoe. Blood immediately flowed down my foot and dripped onto the carpet.

“Take these tissues, Joan, and put pressure on it,” Margaret said. “Now, this may seem silly but I’m going to take your shoe and go wash it.”

Paul, my boss, came over with some papers. “Joan!” he said, startled. “What happened? I was coming here to give you work to do but I can’t now. I’ll look for some first aiders.”

There is a system of designated first aid officers at work but at 8:20 AM, most of them hadn’t yet arrived. Later, someone told me that Paul had run through the eighth level calling for first aid. I wondered whether or not I should mention that I was a qualified first aider. Eventually, three first aiders rushed into the pod carrying a very big first aid kit.

The first order of business was to prop my leg up on a filing cabinet. Kristy and Heidi cleaned my foot to reveal a large but shallow gash in my toe. They sterilised and bandaged it, while Barry hovered around watchfully. He brought me a towel and a box to keep my foot elevated through the day as I sat at the computer.

“All better!” they declared, packed up the kit, filled in an incident report and waved goodbye.

I spent the day hopping through the office barefoot. All day, environment group people were asking me what happened. I even got a call from someone in our Morwell (Gippsland) office who had heard about my accident. In the evening, when I schmoozed at the Young Engineers Australia‘s Christmas drinks, I found out that even the water engineers and materials engineers had heard the news. I was a declared a hobblit.

My toe is still numb, bleeding and wrapped up like a Christmas present. The progress I have made in overcoming my fear of escalators may have just been set back.

I went hardware shopping at Big W today. My shopping list included a stanley knife, rake, metal ruler, spray paint, toolbox and gardening gloves.

While shopping, I walked by a stack of colourful clear plastic storage bins, about 55 L in size. There were purple ones, pink ones, green ones, blue ones… They sure were real pretty.

It is traditional for field personnel in my company have one of these kind of boxes to keep their tools in. Since I have started accumulating tools, I thought it was about time I obtained a container.

I wanted a green one, of course. And all my colleauges had white ones so mine would be the prettiest in the store room — AND the only one with wheels.

The green one was in the middle of the stack. I lifted the purple, pink and blue ones out of the way, and as I was extracting my chosen green box, the box at the bottom of the pile decided to exercise its wheeling power. It rolled away away me, carrying along with it all the boxes on top! The stack collided into three adjacent stacks and everything went rolling, toppling, and crashing.

“Oh!” I thought.

I looked around. No store assistants.

I put down my toolbox so that I had my hands free to reassemble the display but the display platform was small and the boxes kept wheeling off. I really don’t know how the store assistants managed to balance four stacks on it in the first place!

I put my shopping items into my green box, found the right size lid and wheeled it away from the chaos to look for some professional help.

Like this one but greener and with more wheels.