What I've Been Doing The Past Week.

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I have done nothing interesting. Seriously. My life is a huge bore and there's no reason for you to read this post. It will be a complete waste of your time. Unless you want to hear about how I set up a surgery in my bathroom and operated on my own foot. But who doesn't do that??

That's my toe. I can think of no warmer welcome I could extend to you for this, my weekend post, than a shot of my festering foot. You see I developed an ingrown toenail which may be the most disturbing of all the ingrown things.

I somehow broke my toenail a week ago. I can't even remember how I did it. It's winter so, I mean, it could have been from anything really. I have lost so much moisture by the middle of winter that sometimes when I blink my eyes don't open back up.

Breaking a nail can happen just by clapping my hands. I can't even go to concerts during the winter months for fear of spraying the surrounding audience with shards of my nails. Nobody wants that many strangers having access to their DNA.

Breaking my toenail somehow had the unfortunate side effect of causing the side of my nail to become ingrown.

Like a good little Googler, I immediately went to the Internet to see how long before I died of cancer from my ingrown toenail. Surprisingly none of the posts I read warned of it being a sure sign of toe cancer and therefore imminent death.

The most common ingrown toenail home remedy was to soak your foot in warm water. This softens the skin around the side of your big toe (it's ALWAYS the big toe that the real asshead on your foot - when's the last time you got a bunion on your baby toe?) and allows the nail to grow out more easily.

I didn't like that remedy because it didn't seem extreme enough so I searched further into the depths of Google until I found a cure that involved dental floss, cotton balls and knives.

I got everything I needed and laid it out in my bathroom on a towel laid on my windowsill. Cotton balls, isopropyl alcohol, Polysporin (I'm a very conscientious amateur surgeon), dental floss, a straight pin and an orange stick (I decided to go with an orange stick instead of a knife because my knives were in the dishwasher with salmonella on them).

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We'll email you this post, so you can refer to it later.

According to random people on the Internet who probably no longer have toes, the cure to an ingrown toenail is to push the skin of your toe back and then pack the space between your toenail and skin with cotton. This pushes the skin aside and, I don't know ... helps the toenail un-ingrow?

What the random Internet people don't tell you is the blinding, blinding pain that will sear throughout your body the second you push the cotton in. I haven't had a baby but I imagine the pain is on par with childbirth if you were birthing a baby out of your toe.

I pushed and smashed and shoved alcohol soaked cotton into my angry inflamed toe and pushed it in even further with an orange stick. It hurt. I peed a little.

Then I covered everything up with a bandaid, closed the surgery for the night and went to bed. The next morning I expected to wake, look at my fully healed toe and begin my new life journey as a toe healer. Drifting off to sleep with a smile on my lips I envisioned being courted by all the best medical journals begging me to publish my findings.

I almost got out of bed to Google restaurants around the Mayo clinic so I'd know what to wear when they asked me out for dinner and drinks to get my insight on toes. We'd laugh and clink glasses, and I'd feel so stupid for wondering what to wear because obviously we would all be wearing white doctor's outfits with Mayo clinic written on them so everyone in the restaurant would know to be in awe of our healing powers.

I would flash a free smile at everyone who shyly admired me.

As it happens, when I woke up my toe was exactly the same only worse. So basically it was just worse. This wasn't something I thought the medical journals would get excited about so I put off calling them.

Instead I tried the soaking my foot in warm water trick a few times a day which didn't even require a surgical station in my bathroom at all. So disappointing.

I'm on day two of the foot soaking and I have no idea if my big, angry, asshead toe is better or worse, but if I find that it's starting to leak and I will seek genuine medical attention, so don't you worry about that. - I already have my therapist on speed dial.

I meant to tell you all about the vegetable (and fruit!) seeds I bought last week at Seedy Saturday but I'm running right out of time here. I had no idea that toe story was going to be so long. Not to worry, I will have the seed porn next week. I promise.

Eating & Stuff

My July Community Garden Seen from a Different Perspective.

I spent the other evening looking at my vegetable garden tour posts pining for days I'll get to spend my days and nights in these rows.

No Knead Bread. Cooking it in a wood fired oven.

I haven't *quite* decided whether to do this bread in the wood fired oven this weekend or not. I'm going to make the dough, but I might just cook it in the regular oven instead of the pizza oven. But then, the video in this post makes me really want to cook it in the pizza oven. 😆If I cook in the wood oven outside, I'll Instagram it Sunday afternoon or night while I'm doing it.

Curried Sweet Potato and Apple Soup Recipe

I made this recipe on a whim this week. It's a curry sweet potato soup with apples made with water. So it has like 4 calories a serving or something. K, I think it's actually 100 calories. I NEED to use up all the sweet potatoes I grew so this seemed like a good option. I tried it basically wanting to lament the disgustingness of "diet" recipes. But this was actually good! If you make it, don't skip the cilantro!

Interior Shutters. Goodbye Ugly Curtains, Hello Perfect Solution.

Remember the interior shutters I made? I'm thinking of making more for my upstairs windows andddddd possibly making them into bi-folding doors between my dining room and front foyer. Although before I make more of these I should probably finish doing the trim work that still needs to be done after ripping up my floors.

Have a good remainder of your weekend!