It’s been a weird week here with Mr. & Mrs. This-side-of-glory.

For my part, my cold is mostly gone, but it looks like it’ll be a long time before my voice is completely normal. I was afraid of this. I injured my vocal cords about five years ago by singing incorrectly, and ever since then, I’ve been prone to this. I don’t feel that much under the weather — maybe just a little iffy — but I’ll stay home from church tomorrow anyway.

I mean, it was one thing when I just had a deep voice. It just gave me a Garbo-esque woman-of-mystery quality:

But things have just gone downhill from there, and now I sound like Andy Devine. For youngsters, I’ll mention that Andy Devine was a character actor who was around just forever and very much in demand for voice-overs, owing to his um, “special” vocal quality. He was the voice of Friar Tuck in Disney’s “Robin Hood” and one of the talking bullets in “Roger Rabbit.”

If that’s still not ringing a bell, try listening to one or both of the old corn flakes commercials below, and then ask yourself if you’d want Cornelius to sing the Troparion of the Resurrection in Tone 8 this week in your church:

So that’s my fun. And what’s Greg been up to? Oh, I almost forgot. He got hit with a flying computer monitor and now he has staples in his head.

So anyway …

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Out for a spin … literally

This was all on Thursday. A lot of our snow had melted, so Greg thought he would take himself out to suck up some free wi-fi somewhere and do a little work away from home. There was some fresh rain and snow coming down, so he took the camera hoping to catch some good pictures. But he hadn’t gotten more than about five miles away when he could tell that the sleety junk that was falling was really making it hard to drive safely, so he just started looking for a place to turn around.

And then it happened …

There weren’t any other cars around, and Greg was still driving straight ahead. But suddenly the back end of the car lost traction and started to slide. By the time he’d corrected the spin, he was driving sideways. So the car went into a shallow ditch, bounced off the embankment (losing the fender) and then spun around the way he’d come.

Another driver came along right away — that’s the nice lady in the white truck above who’s making sure traffic stops while Greg took a picture in case our insurance needed to see it. Not that the traffic wouldn’t have stopped — it’s not every day you see a guy walking around with blood running down his face. He was seat-belted in when the accident happened and probably wouldn’t have been injured, except there was a client’s computer monitor in the back seat and when the car hit, the monitor must’ve just gone flying. And wouldn’t you know it, it couldn’t have been one of those new lightweight, flat-panel jobs. Oh no, it was one of those gigantic old numbers that weighs as much as a bunch of sledgehammers. The corner must’ve clipped Greg on the side of his head, and it just opened up an inch-long wound.

Thank God, it was only a flesh wound, but it did bleed quite a bit. When I first met up with him at the place the car had been towed, Greg was brightly greeting me and telling me he was fine, everything was fine, it was all fine-fine. And it would have been a real comfort, except that he still had two dark lines of dried blood down one side of his face. When I made an involuntary noise, he turned away to spare me the trauma, which would’ve been a good instinct, except that at some point he had wiped his bloody hand off on the seat of his pants, which I think was almost more shocking to look at.

While we got the car seen to, we figured out what to do about the boy. He had canceled the ambulance that had been called, just because there had been some crossed wires somewhere and it looked like it would’ve taken a solid hour to get there. He felt fine, not even a headache, but then we all thought that a man who’d been hit with a computer monitor took some looking after.

As it turned out, luck was on our side. The emergency room of the nearby hospital had absolutely nothing going on, and Greg was able to walk right in. They asked him enough questions to figure out it wasn’t a concussion, cleaned up the wound (no more Mr. Murder-victim) and then they stapled the wound. This is news to me — what, medical types can’t be bothered to give a person good, honest stitches anymore? Well, apparently not. They didn’t even give him an anesthetic for it — just stapled him in the head like he was a multi-page document. Perpetual Scientist that he is, Greg asked them to give him one of the staples to take home. Which they did. It’s out in the rental car. I think Greg’ll probably make me look at it a couple more times before I get to throw it away, until he’s ready to replace it with the staples that they take out in a week or so.

For now, he’s a little Staple-head. You can reach under his sandy locks and feel little metal edges. Ick. My poor sweetie.

He still feels fine. He had some muscle aches the next day and a really mild headache. It could’ve been much worse. As Greg was driving the car in with the tow-truck, they passed two other spin-outs. The tow-truck driver told him that the two passengers of one of the wrecks had gone to the hospital.

So we’re both very thankful. Greg even found time back while waiting for the tow-truck to take the kind of winter picture he had wanted to get. I think it came out really beautiful. Probably not worth a broken car and busted head over, but then nothing is.