Hands

My hands are tired.  My hands have been tired for several years now.  I've over used them in my life, with hard tearing cracking labor.

Tearing apart four couches in the last couple years has really done a number on my hands.  I have little choice, since having bad choice couches hauled off by the garbage company is vastly expensive.

I have learned my lesson!  Don't take in used couches.  They come with smells.  Maybe I smell nothing but the cats do.  Then they over mark.

Couches are uncomfortable to sit on anyway.  I've never met a comfortable couch yet.  You sag into the seat below the angle of your bent knees then struggle fiercely to come out of it.  Or the seat cushions are far too wide to allow you to lean against the back of the couch.  What are they good for?  Sleeping!

Now, if I watch TV and that now is a rare thing, I sit in a wood straight back chair.  The cats don't even like sleeping on the two couches I have left, both used when they came.

Eventually, at least one if not both of those will go too.

Tearing apart couches is not for the faint of hand.  It requires yanking, pulling, cutting, prying and pounding.

Once the cloth is cut and pulled off,, and that's the worst part, I must strip them of foam and cardboard, stapled all over the cheap wood frame.  Some have lots of metal.  The last one had no metal.  Instead of springs, the cushions were held up by lawn chair strapping stapled to particle board.

Nails are not often used in couch manufacture but staples are.  Nor are screws. Couches are almost entirely stapled together.  Once you spill something  and it penetrates the foam or the cardboard, the couch is done for.  That smell won't ever leave the couch.  The cloth or vinyl outer covering isn't the problem.  You can clean the hell out of that, but liquid will find a way in, through a zipper or crack or hole or tear and then the smell left is forever.  Don't ever get a used couch if you have cats is the moral to the story.

My finger joints swell too with osteo arthritis with too much use until so painful I can barely move my fingers.  At first it was only the joint on my right thumb and index fingers.  Both joints had been bitten through years ago, when netting a loose dying cat at a Eugene FCCO clinic. But now it's several other joints too on both hands.

I read up on osteo arthritis and it's about the joint lining.  Over years of use, it gets tears in it and the cartilage reduces, same old.  Age is painful.  The lumps that form on my joints are hard, unlike the red, hot, soft and inflamed joints of rheumatoid arthritis.  The best option when my joints swell with osteo arthritis is resting the joints.  Doing more labor when they are hurting damages them even more.

I will dismantle no more couches!

I thought I had a wart on my left index finger although it didn't really like what I thought a wart would look like.  I've never had a hand wart.  But, nonetheless, I got some wart freeze off stuff and tried to freeze it off.  When the skin turned white and hard, I shaved at the dead skin with an emery board as instructed on the wart removal box.

Funny thing happened though.  Suddenly I hit a pocket of pus.  This was not a wart.  It was an infection.  Most likely, somewhere in there is a splinter.  I got a splinter a week ago on the same finger a half inch above this other spot, that now really hurts.  I haven't gotten that splinter out yet either.  I wear gloves but some things penetrate gloves and sometimes I don't wear gloves because they are bulky and hot and I can't feel to do fine textured things with my fingers then.  My hands pay a price.

Then there's the painful lump on my right hand, left after I hit the railing in frustration at the trailer park, after that man confronted me and told me the cat problem at the trailer park was all my fault, for feeding them. I was feeding the cats of a woman in the hospital until I could determine if she was coming back or not.  The confrontation left me in despair over the lack of kindness to the cats or even to one's own neighbor now very ill and in the hospital, and angry, to be blamed.  It's been awhile now, so I think I probably broke a small bone.  One day it will no longer hurt.

Today, outside of this typing, my hands are at rest.