The story begins a week ago. Although I live in an almost Alpine area, that’s when we got our first fair share of snow. I guess we caught up on global warming when we joined the European Union last May. So after two days of medium to heavy snowing, the weather returns to its semi-spring mode with warm days and cold nights. And here the little bastards of accidentality jump to life. The remaining patches of snow, which are slowly melting during the day, produce dribbling streams of water which freeze into thin layers of ice, luring passers-by to unknowingly take a plunge.
Fast forward to last night. It’s 1 a.m. and I just arrived home. I parked my car and went to the garage where I took the plastic canvas for my car to cover it so that my brother wouldn’t have to scrap the ice from the windshield in the morning. Now, the thing with those canvases is that they’re meant to be put on the car preferably by two people. I applied the canvas to the front bumper and threw the rest of it over the car roof. Then I had to get on the other side of the car and that’s the moment when I stepped on the aforementioned ice. The world around me shifted into slow motion and I had enough time to imagine the disastrous consequences the fall was going to cause to my back while still in the air. Then I sensed that there’s something wrong with the way I was falling. My left arm hit the hood of the car and while my body was still paying dues to the Newtonian priciples, my left upper appendage decided to have a bit of a rest. I heard a loud clack and pain seared through my left shoulder. I used my right arm to get up and started feeling my left shoulder. I tried swinging it a bit to determine the seriousness of the clacking noise and found out that I had magaed to dislocate it. Great. I ran into house and if the driver of the car which passed our driveway at that moment had seen me, he surely would have thought that there’s a zombie running to our house with its left arm swinging limply.
I woke up my brother to drive me to the emergency but after uttering two sentences remembered that he had to get up early this morning because he’s taking a long weekend with his girlfriend. I told him to go back to sleep and went to wake up my mother. She was still awake and quickly got ready to drive me to town. I got my health-care card and join her in the garage. She told me to get in the car but I replied that although my left arm might be just a freely hanging limb at the moment, I was still able to close the garage door after her. While she was starting the car, I tried to wiggle my shoulder a bit just to make sure it was dislocated as the pain wasn’t enough of a signal that I need to se a doctor. And just as she turned the key and the sound of the engine filled the garage I heard another large clack in my shoulder and felt the joint falling back into its place. I almost screamed “It’s alive!” but rather than freaking my mom further, I told her what had just happened and asked her to get out of the car.
Luckily we had some gel for aching joints and rheumatic trouble at home which helped me to get rid of the pain. Then I watched “Muppets from Space” DVD which soothed me a bit more and went to sleep.
Today (it’s 2 p.m. at our place at the moment) my shoulder is still aching a bit and I have a bit of a trouble lifting it up over my head, but I am at least reassured that I’ll be able to act tomorrow evening and we won’t have to cancel our play. Plus I’ll be excused from setting up the scenery. 
I wanted to start a completely different thread yesterday but I’ll just throw it in here to end with a bit of bragging. Yesterday my editor told me that the second print of the first three Captain Underpants books in my translation just got out of the press. Which means kids are reading it and my translation worked well. Yay for me!