Live Hard, Play Hard

After 5 days of orientation and no regular work, the weekend was tediously long for everyone on the ranch.

The snow on Monday didn't help everyone's restlessness.

When the ranch closed on Tuesday, that was it. A group of us organized to go play snow games.

We had too few for capture the flag, and too few resources for a productive snowball fight, so we improvised games. After too much running, we settled on frisbee with a 5-gallon bucket lid. Perfect improvisation.

When that got boring, we added in a snowball fight, throwing snowballs at the person who caught the frisbee. Every once and a while the game would dissolve into a full-scale snowball fight as people charged the catcher. Once everyone was sufficiently tired, we would settle down into regular frisbee again.

Making snowballs was particularly hard with my right arm in a cast (and not wanting to get it wet), but luckily the snow had a crust of ice, and small sheets of ice could be prized up and lobbed at other people. I was also able to use my cast as armor, blocking fierce throws of the frisbee that would have hurt to catch.

During one of the degenerated snowball fighting bouts, someone shouted "Look out!" and I was able to look up from prying up a small ice sheet to see the bucket lid whistling its way toward me (in a remarkably straight trajectory, too).

Well, it fortunately didn't hit my nose or knock me unconscious. It did, unfortunately, hit my teeth, chipping one of my front teeth pretty badly.

Crap.

So I now have a chipped tooth, which was rapidly repaired by a local dentist (after two days of drinking meals through straws and self-consciously avoiding smiling).

Although I look normal again, I apparently cannot ever again eat corn on the cob, or bite into an apple or anything else that laterally stresses my front teeth.

Despite our limited ability for regeneration, you only have what you're born with, and everything else is subtraction. That being said, though, you don't get extra points for dying with all your teeth intact.

Here's to stories.