Okay, I just want to go on the record and say, I am NOT suicidal.

So I'm drilling some holes in my arm chair this afternoon. Fairly innocent task to be accomplishing. The 20 year old furniture castors on this chair have been broken for awhile. I have been negligent in making good on the needed repair. I am on a general improvement kick lately, so I thought I'd do this work on my chair.

I'm using my drill, for one of the first 10 times since I got it for Christmas. (I don't do home improvement tasks very often) The fault with giving me a power tool is, I'm unlikely to go buy accessories for it. Thus, all I have for drill bits are some dollar store ones that I got at the time I got the drill.

Without an alternative, I begin drilling holes with the largest of these drill bits. Its going reasonably well. How hard is drilling holes in a 2x4? I finish the first side, and switch to the second. All of a sudden the task of drilling holes becomes difficult. For some reason this piece of wood is extremely hard. I've drilled through steel with more success than I was having with this piece of wood. I get to one hole and there is so much resistance to my drilling efforts that smoke is emanating from the hole.

Then something weird happened. It kinda makes sense, when you think about the physics of something. But still, when something weird happens, you can't help but be surprised.

The drill bit bent. 90 degree right turn angle, in the split of an instant. This, however, would not alone be enough to necessitate a blog entry, or the inclusion of my warning at the beginning of this note. The truly eye-opening thing that came out of this little misadventure is, I ended up drilling my wrist with the drill. No, I did not put a hole clear through the wrist. However, what was accomplished, was I peeled open a nice wound. Again, not that noteworthy, in and of itself. However, as I'm washing the blood off my arm, (and there was a lot of it) I happened to take note of the actual location of the wound. Standing up proudly, a blue-ish outline of my arterial vein was throbbing methodically not 5 millimeters (or so) from the location of the inadvertent puncture wound to my arm.

The frightening coincidences that make up our daily lives . . .