Big Girls Don't Cry

I fell last night.

A full-out, splayed across the floor on my back fall.

I had been cross-stitching, or rather, I had been pulling out all the mistakes in my cross stitching and was out of thread. I had been in the back of the house, looking for thread and emailing my mom for a bit, and Scott assumed I was "done" in the living room and shut everything down.

I, however, still had some tidying up to do and went back into the living room. In the dark. Didn't even bother to turn on the hall light.

This would be no problem except I have been on a shredding frenzy for the past four days, shredding canceled checks and old bills dating all the way back to 1988. The shredder, my box(es) of stuff to shred, and then the new boxes of stuff to go back into the attic have been moved into the hallway (don't ask - for some reason this is where I've been doing all my "dirty work").

You see where this is going, right?

Big box of paper vs my foot. Guess who lost?

Scarily, I had my sewing needle in my teeth and was holding a pair of Ghinger scissors. I caught my foot on that last box and went sailing through the air, landing on my back and shoulder. And, as I hit with a "thud", I heard my sewing box pop open and about a kazillion itty bitty glass beads about the size of a grain of sand scatter across the dining room tile floor.

Scott, clueless, poked around the corner and found me, face up, laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. What else was I supposed to do? I'm lucky I wasn't stabbed with the scissors or that I didn't swallow that needle. And all I could think about was, CRAP! THOSE DAMN BEADS ARE ALL OVER MY FRIESE CARPET!

(Friese carpet is like a modern day shag - high traffic, ranks up there with Berber but without the loops - try picking beads out of THAT mess.)

After regrouping, I spent the next hour and a half picking up beads, thread and my pride.

Lessons learned:
1. Keep needles out of your mouth lest you plan on swallowing one.
2. That rule - don't run with scissors? - yeah, listen to that one.
3. My carpet is cool, but now it is a beaded carpet. There's no way I'll get all those beads out of that!
4. If you aren't bleeding and you can move all your limbs, you're okay.
5. Ibuprofen goes a long way when you're old and you fall.
6. If you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?