So last Thursday or Friday (can’t remember which), I was out in the side yard trying to get the cat to come back in the hosue. Since I hadn’t planned on being out there that long, I hadn’t bothered to stick shoes on. I’m a barefoot kind of person 90% of the time that I’m not at work or out shopping. So I wander around the yard trying to get the cat to follow me back to the door. We have a bunch of shrubs out front, and a couple of them have thorns. Well, I guess that quite a number of their thorns have been getting into the yard because I stepped on a bunch of them. Mind you, being a 90% barefoot kind of person, I have calloused feet that make walking on gravel or blacktop or most other unpleasant surfaces just fine. The thorns were a stickier matter. A couple hit the softer arch (damned high arches), and a few hit my hard-as-leather heels. After giving up on the cat, who wouldn’t leave the stoop of our unused front door, I came inside. I guess I came inside with a thorn still in my foot.

Saturday at work was a long eight-hour shift, and I spent the entire day on a foot with a thorn in my heel. Aggravating. I figured it’d work its way out, but today I noticed it was still there when I was at work today. I guess because it’s in the calloused heel, whatever hole it made going in disappeared in the layers of hardened skin cells. Yippee. So upon getting home from work today, I spent the better part of a half and hour with a needle trying to get at the damned thing. I finally found it: a tiny little sliver about a sixteenth of an inch long. I had no idea I had so many layers of calloused skin on my feet. Of course, if I didn’t have hard heels, there’s a good chance I would have ended up with more thorns than just one. Then again, if I didn’t have such callouses, it would likely mean that I don’t walk around barefoot much which means I wouldn’t have been walking around outside barefoot which means that I wouldn’t have been able to step on thorns to get them stuck in my feet in the first place. Madness.

At any rate, just a random post about the thorn in my foot because I felt like randomly posting. I’m going to stop rambling and just go work on editing the chapters of my novel. I’ve got a lot of red ink and a lot of time today.