That, my lovelies, is an elbow. My elbow. Yeah.

And that’s just the inside view. The other side of my arm has bruising that goes down to my wrist.

It all happened on Wednesday. I was camping with my kids and I took my bike to the bathhouse that morning to get a shower. As I was leaving, a family pulled up in a golf cart. I had to crank my bike pedal around and fumbled a bit (c’mon, it was early) then I took off riding, completely forgetting that my towel was slung over the handlebars. It snagged in the wheel (of course) and I flew over the handlebars and hit the road hard. As I rolled painfully to my feet to detangle everything, golf cart Dad turned to his kids and said, “drunk.”

So that was awesome. Anyway, within an hour my left elbow was an enormous purple grapefruit, and my right wrist was badly sprained and I couldn’t make a fist. We had tickets for an amusement park 45 minutes down the road, and I drive a stick shift.

I soldiered through, bought a wrist brace and took some Advil and here it is Monday and the wrist is still sore (but a bit better) and the elbow looks horrific but feels much less so. And I lost a couple of days of writing to all this nonsense.

Last year on vacation, a kid cannonballed into the pool so hard it swamped my laptop from ten feet away, and killed my MacBook, losing me a ton of writing time (not to mention money). I am simply not fated to write while on vacation. It is not meant to be.

And now I’ll just cue up my Harry Potter marathon and chug some more Advil while I peck tentatively at my keyboard, wincing away. Hope your holiday week is going better!