We have a Friday night ritual that started way back in Arizona when we discovered the joys of making our own pizza. So now every Friday night, we make a pizza, change into pajamas, pour some wine, and watch bad movies, usually Lifetime Original Movies, although those are harder to come by here. Occasionally we watch a good movie on Friday night, but we try not to let that happen very often.

Last week we were really looking forward to pizza night. We had a bottle of wine that we had saved from our trip to Italy and we had decided to go ahead and drink it for pizza night. We had a real movie, not Lifetime, that we had checked out from the library. It did, however, star LL Cool J as an FBI profiler so we thought it would be suitably dramatic and not too intellectual (no offense to LL, of course). We had mozzarella cheese aplenty. The night promised to be fantastic in only the way wine, melted cheese, and LL Cool J could be. Or so we thought.

It was going so well. Before pizza, I was making a dessert to take to a friend's house the next night. Ben was playing video games. Then, he made the mistake of coming into the kitchen to help unload dishes before pizza-making. Big mistake.

How big? Well...


Here is Ben at the ER of our local hospital with his thumb wrapped up because (squint your eyes and grit your teeth here if you're squeamish) he broke a glass and sliced his thumb all the way to the bone while putting dishes away. Eeeeek. I feel icky just thinking about it. There was yelling and frantic cleaning of broken glass and a drive to the hospital.

So at the hospital they poked, prodded, wrapped it up and told us to wait. So we waited and waited, and looked at pictures in Dutch magazines, and waited some more. Finally the real doctor was ready to see us. He poked and prodded and poked and just about got Ben to hit him. He thought it would be no big deal to go poking around inside the wound to see if the tendon was cut at all. In case you're wondering, it apparently hurts A LOT when someone pokes your tendon. And no, Ben had no serious damage.

So then an "intern" gets to do the sutures. I put it in quotes because I'm not sure if "intern" = medical degree, or if "intern" = med student, or if perhaps it was just some guy who was interested in maybe being a doctor, because he had ZERO knowledge of how to do sutures. The real doctor had to tell him how to open the packet containing the needle and thread. And he was shaking the whole time he was sewing up Ben's thumb. On the plus side, he looked almost exactly like Napolean Dynamite, so at least I was able to find the whole situation slightly funny.

I tried to take a very covert picture, but unfortunately the "intern" is hiding behind Ben.


Finally, we got out of there and got to make our pizza. Luckily there were no more major incidents and LL Cool J lived up to all our expectations, as did our pizza. Ben now claims an inablility to unload the dishwasher, but we'll have to see about that. Maybe we can thumbwrestle to decide.