The Injured Vinyl Slave

It seems that in the past couple of weeks our lives have descended in to a sticky pit of vinyl heck. As you may already know from prior posts, Valerie and two of my sisters, Pam and Judy all went in on a vinyl cutter together and since then we have spent every waking hour cutting vinyl, weeding vinyl, cutting wood on which to place the vinyl, sanding and painting said wood, etc. etc. ad nauseum.

Last weekend they set up a booth at a holiday craft show that was set up in the gymnasium of Sarah’s Middle School and they really did very well especially considering it is a very small show. This coming weekend they are signed up to do two days at Gig Harbor’s Winterfest which is supposedly a much bigger show and is two days long. Last weekend’s show was a mixed blessing, they did very well but had sold a lot of their product meaning this week has been spent churning out as much as is humanly possible.

That means that we have literally been working on producing vinyl crafty stuff every moment of every day. It has gotten to the point that Joshua changed his user name on Club Penguin to “Vinyl Slave”. That is not a joke. We have let the kids know though that the more money that mommy makes selling Christmas crud, the better their prospects for decent gifts this year. That always keeps them going for another day.

Last night we had our first injury of the holiday season. Sarah and two of her cousins have been working on making cute refrigerator magnets that will also be sold at the stand. They went like hotcakes and sold out for $1 a piece at the last show so they have been mass-producing them to be sold this coming weekend as well. They are sticking them all to a large piece of sheet metal as they are created.

Sarah was holding the sheet metal yesterday when Joshua bumped into the sharp edge slicing a pretty good gash in his left ear. Once we saw it, it was pretty obvious that it would need stitches to heal it up properly. (forgive the picture quality, these were all taken with my cell phone)

Joshua was less-than-thrilled at the prospect of accompanying me to the E.R. to get sewn up but along the ride there I convinced him that it would be pretty cool to go to school the next day with a big sewn up gash in your ear. Nothing excites a 9-year-old more than the prospect of grossing out his classmates with no potential for punishment so he was suddenly down with the trip.

I took him to Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup and before long, we were checked in and ready to wait. Joshua was thrilled to have a hospital wristband which to him looked just like a waterslide pass. He has vowed never to remove it.
I insisted that Josh continue to hold his blood-soaked toilet paper up to his injured ear even though the bleeding had long since stopped. My reasoning was that the sight of blood would somehow move us up on the emergency room priority list.

I don’t know if that strategy worked or not but it only took a few minutes before we were in the examining room. Josh chatted up his doctor asking if this was their first time giving stitches and basically asking her every question he could think of the entire time she worked on him.
Only a few minutes after that before he had his six stitches and we were on our way again back to the vinyl sweatshop this time with an orange popsicle in hand, no worse for wear.