There's nothing quite like an Enema to wake you up in the morning

"July has come and gone without a trace of a ZCCNL"

Yes, yes I know all of you have expected to see this sentence running accross the bottom of your screen while watching CNN, but I suppose things like wars, city-sweeping power outages and who won the all you can eat hot dog contest in Wangsville Texas takes precidence.

I apologize for my tardiness, however my July was wrought with epic struggles of teaching camps, illness, ankle injuries, more illness and saving the world from the dark wizard X'thxilngd as he attempted to use the +2 runestone of ammonia to make all of mankind kneel to him. On top of that exhausting debacle I've been searching for a new place to live when our lease expires on September 1st.

This time of year my mind is always on other things and it's hard for me to find something sufficient to waste my time ranting about, so I guess I'll talk about the emergency room.

When I injured my ankle three weeks ago I attempted to walk it off in a macho fashion, hobbling up and down stairs to attain frozen meats in leiu of an ice pack hiding the fact my foot was three times its normal size. I even went to sleep (hey, don't give me that dirty look, I elevated the injury and put frozen meat on it, what else do you want?!). Then I woke up around 2:30 to severe foot cramps and insane swelling. I tried to get up to go into the bathroom but I couldn't even stand on it. I was sure it was broken. After uttering something anti-semitic under my breath, I debated whether or not to call an ambulence. Rather than risk waking my roommates and my great unkle next door who keeps a loaded shotgun under the couch he sleeps on, I decided to bite the bullet, admit I was hurt and called my dad who took me to the hospital.Now, I figgured going to the hospital at 3am would be a cakewalk. In, x-ray, out bada boom bada bing as the hitmen say. but of course I was mistaken. I was wheeled in (yes I know the irony of me being in a wheelchair, laugh about it while you can) and had to fill out paperwork and answer a myriad of questions before even seeing a doctor. I thought the examination was the doctor's job, not the person at the desk! Luckily I've been blessed with a fairly high tolerance for pain so I was able to ignore the throbbing, swollen mass that had been my left ankle mere four hours prior while I scrawled down my address, social security number and whether or not I prefered blondes to brunettes, and Coke or Pepsi. But I can only imagine what kind of hoops people with worse injuries had to go through! Taped to the desk was a chart. On the left side was a smiley face with a huge grin smeared across it's white, pasty face like it had just wone a game of hide the sausage. On the far right was another "smiley" face, this one looking like it had just zipped himself up in his pants...in he middle was every emotion in between the two. So my question is....if a person is in enough pain that they can't talk, do they really need to waste time pointing to a chart of smiley faces how they feel? "Hmmmm I'm not sure if I'm the smiley that looks like a nervous Rchard Nixon....or is it the one two to the right of that one that appears as though it messed it's pants after eating at Cafe Ole'"? It boggles the mind. Unless said chart is for mute or deaf people, then I think we'd have a great reality TV show on our hands. "View the epic struggle of the orally impaired as they visit the emergeny room!" I'm sure Fox would pick it up. Oh and another thing is that I didn't see any braile smileys anywhere, so apparently the emergency room hates Hellen Keller. "One 'waters' for no pain, two for badly hurt!" If there's a bad Hellen keller Joke I've never heard it...The rest of the Emergency room visit was fairly routine...you know, doctors prodding you at various places:

"Does this hurt?"
"No."
"Does this hurt?"
"No."
"How about....THIS!?"
"***Much swearing and cursing of doctors' deceased family members deleted***"

Turns out the foot was really badly sprained, not broken...though that didn't change the fact I felt like Oprah had just stepped on my foot. At least I got Vicodin out of it. However, I only took it for a couple days and didn't like the way it made me fall asleep while playing Solitaire at work, passing out in mid-sentence...and thinking I was Condoleeza Rice for six hours was just a little bothersome. So count this as the newsletter for July. I'll be back at the end of the month, probably to complain about the fact there was no way I was going to instruct BSU's drums again this fall, yet somehow I let me wallet talk me into it.

This is Zach, as always saying "Please don't add me to your block list"