A Most Untimely Injury

I'm typing this with a wrist brace on my right hand. No, I didn't hurt myself masturbating but thank you for asking. Nor did I suffer an acute case of carpal tunnel from playing too much Forza Motorsport 2 (although doing so does cause discomfort). And no, the most obvious source of the injury -- a mountain biking crash -- was not the cause either. At least not directly.

You see, I hurt my wrist bowling. Yes, bowling. Some of the folks I ride with out of Redhook every Thursday night wanted to switch things up a bit two weeks ago and go bowling. I only get presented with an invite to don the funky community shoes and sashe across the slippery wooden planks once every few years so I immediately agreed to join them. Kristin and I, another couple also named Doug and Kristin (weird, I know), Lidia, and Ken all went bowling together. And it was fun. Three games would have been fine, but everyone wanted to stay for a fourth game and, naturally, two frames into it, we all secretly had enough and wanted to stop. At least that's what everyone's body language was saying. Except for Lidia, whose a dynamo of energy.

Anyway, ever since I woke up that next morning, some 11 days ago, my right wrist has been hurting. I didn't use too heavy of a ball -- a 12 pounder felt just about right -- and I didn't think I was throwing it with any serious effort, at least not enough to hurt myself. In fact, I was fairly consistent too and had the highest score of everyone so I wasn't up there just whipping it down the lane trying to make a racket. But, nonetheless, my wrist is hurt. There's nothing wrong with the bones or joints as tapping it causes no pain, but squeezing things such as the R Trigger on the Xbox 360 controller does cause some soreness. Also, trying to lift things with my right hand hurts.

Which is unfortunate as the two rides I am leading this weekend will both likely require some serious amounts of hike-a-bike. Which is going to be difficult, being that I can't lift things with my right arm! Can't wait to see how this pans out.

There is a funny side-story related to the bowling alley we went to. This was back in the fall of 2000, during my first time out to Redmond for a business trip to Nintendo with the guys from BradyGames. It was me, my co-author, and my editor in a rental car looking for a place to eat. We were working on the guidebook for Banjo-Tooie, one of my favorite games of all time, and it was time to hunt down a restaurant. It seemed that we were eating at Chili's every single night so I decided to play a game with the Neverlost GPS system in the car. I decided that we'd let Neverlost pick a place at random for us to eat. I forgot how I managed to do this, but after a few punches on the keypad, Neverlost was leading us to a cafe. I forget the name of it, but it sounded halfway decent and it wasn't far.

It turned out the "restaurant" Neverlost was leading us to was the snack bar in the bowling alley I was at the other night. The place has since had a change in ownership and seems much nicer now, but it was a bit of a dive back 7 years ago. I lost my restaurant-choosing priviliges that night and it took a few more trips out to Nintendo before I was allowed to play with the Neverlost again.

It's fun to think back to those trips. The first few were really good. Sure, we'd work from 8am till 10pm every day for two weeks straight, but we had some good times. Working on the guidebook for Conker's Bad Fur Day was definitely one of the most enjoyable periods in my professional career, thanks in huge part to the great crew I got to work with on it. I miss those types of projects.

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