for your viewing pleasure

although my wounds have healed, thanks to my flare for drama, i present you with a pictorial demonstration of my past pains:

"oh the pain!"

  

"i need towels to stop the bleeding!"

"oh, it still hurts!"

 

"bitter woe!"

"there's only one thing that can help me now..."

"dora!"

the pain! the agony! the HORROR!

disclaimer: for those of you who think my title is just an overly dramatic metaphor and not a warning, be prepared. (don't worry tam, there is no mention of the b-word, so you may proceed without fear.)

so about 2 minutes ago i was unloading the kiln...well, actually the kiln was unloaded yesterday, but all the pieces were sitting on the floor because i unloaded it in a hurry and i didn't do any of the stuff your supposed to do after you unload everything from the kiln, like...remove the stilts and sand the stilt marks on the piece...

okay, so i realize that those of you reading this who have no ceramic or kiln using experience (probably a fair 95 %) might not have any clue what i'm talking about, so i'm going to back up a bit and preface this story with some pictorial instructions:

1. these here are kilns. actually they're paragon kilns, which we happen to use at the shop. (the monstrously sized one that's hidden partially by the short fat kiln is the new one that almost didn't fit through the door. you can tell how big it is by it's ginormous lid. it's so big that if i'm standing in front of it i can't even reach the handle to close it!)

2. these are stilts. you place one of these guys under the pottery and it holds it up on it's little metal prongs (sharp little buggers!)
3. this is me last summer loading a kiln. i'm about to put that plate on a stilt in the kiln. man my hair was long...and quite unruly!
4. these are stilt marks on the bottom of a vase. see how there's three little hole marks. that's where the piece was sitting on the metal prongs. when you unload a kiln you have to take a sanding stone (or a dremmel tool if you're not me and deathly afraid of power tools) and sand down the marks so they aren't sharp to the touch.
okay, are we all on the same page now?

so i was removing the stilts (which sometimes stick to the bottoms of the pieces to the point that you have to give them a fairly good yank to get them off) and the little guy was not coming. well, what typically happens in that situation happened and i ended up puncturing my my thumb with the stilt. don't worry folks, this is a normal, almost daily occurance. HOWEVER...

today was a little different simply because i saw a little glisten when i looked at the very tiny cut that was slightly under my finger nail(ugh), MEANING...

i had i tiny piece of glass in my tiny cut. (for those of you who don't know this, when your pottery is fired the glaze covering it basically becomes glass.) without hesitation i used my very short fingernails to pick the tiny glass particle out of my thumb. this is when i REALIZED...

the tiny piece of glass was actually a little chunk of glass that was about 70% buried in my thumb, and pulling it out was a lot grosser and more painful than i had bargained for. UUGGGHHH!

i proceeded to whimper around the store while clamping a paper towel around my thumb. thankfully, at this point in the day the shop was empty, so i was allowed to be as big of a baby as i wanted to be. WELL...

now i can still feel the dull pain, but thanks to the dora band-aids my mother very hesitantly bought for me (she thinks i'm too old for them, of all things!) i'm 'all better'. and maybe my title is still a little overly dramatic, but after some responses to my 'back' post i couldn't take any chances.