The evening of July 4th, we had a lovely thunderstorm. In addition to the extra water in the stream in front of the house, though, Mother Nature was kind enough to provide a power outage, too.

No big deal, though… we have a generator. It’s a pull-start at the moment, but it has stood us in good stead and is large enough to power the whole house minus the A/C.

I’ve started that generator in the rain dozens of times, and that evening, it was being a little contrary… as it is wont to do from time to time.

It was pouring the rain down. My hand was wet from where the water ran down my arm, which made the pull-handle wet after a bit.

My hand slipped. It has happened before.

I switched to my right arm, pulled again, and the generator fired right up. It wasn’t until I was back in the house that I noticed the ring finger of my left hand still hurt.

I looked down, and the very last segment with the fingernail looked out of alignment with the rest of the finger.

A two-hours visit to the local ER later, my dislocated and broken finger was merely broken. According to the x-rays, which they were kind enough to show me, each segment of our fingers end in a kind of parenthesis-looking structure to let it move around the end of the next segment closer to the knuckle. I broke the top of my ‘parenthesis.’

The red splotches—which a good friend oh-so-helpfully said looked like liver spots on a 70-year-old—are from the poinson whatever I’ve mentioned in earlier posts.

I have always thought that I have impeccable timing. This happened on the second day of a 3,700+ word streak.

Fortunately, the pain has receded enough that I feel I can start learning how to be a six-finger typist. I’m hoping it won’t break the muscle memory for typing I’ve built up over the years, but six weeks is a long time for that.

Ah, well… I learned to type once. I can do it again.

And, yes… dictation is an option. I tried it several times yesterday, but all it produced was frustration. I don’t know if I expect too much or are not patient enough or what, but it was not a fun, productive, enjoyable experience.

Oh… and Dragon on a Parallels Windows 11 VM is about as bad as you might expect. Switching Dragon over to my gaming box (native Windows 11) made the experience a little better, but still, I don’t see how people do that.

I know people do, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of patience and training. I’ll keep working on it and see if I can manage to break through my mental block on it.

I thought about emailing Dean and conceding the challenge, but I ultimately decided not to. I’d hate to concede and make a breakthrough on dictation the next day.

The average pace of a narrator is around 9,200 words per hour. I’d love to manage that with dictation. I know I wouldn’t hit that right away. After all, I’ve been typing for over twenty years. But it’s a nice dream, right?

That’s it for now, I think. Time to work on fiction while I practice my six-fingered typing.  😁

Stay safe out there… at least safer than me.  😜