Little known facts about breaking your kneecap

Last August, my wife provided material for a post on little known facts about breaking your ankle. As implied in my recent post, where my 9-year old observed that his brother now lives on the couch, my older son has provided us with additional bone-breaking insights:

• If you tell a doctor your son has probably broken his kneecap, they will nod indulgently, say, “That’s actually very difficult to do…” , examine the x-ray, and then say incredulously, “Well I’ll be…”
• You can break your kneecap without actually landing on it or even whacking it against something. It is enough to simply kick out really hard with the other leg in such a way that your whole body twists in just the wrong direction, wrenching your supporting leg’s patella from the front (where it belongs), to the side (where it does not).
• A dislocated patella can then snap back into place with such force that it actually breaks the bone into three or more pieces, most of them remaining on the wrong side of your leg from where they belong.
• You can get a lot of sympathy from 14 year old girls from telling a story like this.
• If you really really really want to miss a high adventure camp in June, breaking your kneecap in May will do the trick. You might even get cookies from your devoted Scout leader in the bargain!
• Ditto for final exams. (But they’ll be back… and without cookies.)
• You can sleepwalk with a broken kneecap and not realize it until you are sitting in a chair 10 feet from where you started, in excruciating pain.
• If your dad is asleep when you sleepwalk on your broken kneecap, he might not awake until you have been yelling for a good while. (You may think it’s been an hour, but probably not. Still…)
• The previous trick is a really good way to get extra ice cream, video game time, or whatever else you desire from your guilt-ridden father.
• After such an incident, a young man may still turn down codeine in favor of ibuprofin, because he “doesn’t like the way it makes him feel,” this spite of an anxious father’s urging. (I have many fears, but my son giving in to peer pressure on drugs is not one of them.)

Matthew is scheduled for surgery on Friday, so I will probably be missing Cameron and company’s all-day training on visual design. (Have we mentioned before the incredible internal training opportunities we’ve had, especially recently? One of the best things about working here.) I am really bummed about missing this, but what can you do? Father First (especially if you don’t hear your son screaming in pain in the middle of the night and you still need to earn back some points!)

posted by ted on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 · 2 comments

Return of the Search Logs

A funny thing happened on the way to the search engine… Our latest batch of interesting North Temple search hits:

• What is the goodness of lemon? Excellent question.
• Why teeth fairy forgot about my tooth. High drama indeed.
• Cook book on a screen. Aaron Cannon, Amateur Breadologist and First-hand Accessibility Guru
• Round fruit. Hope they weren’t disappointed with the square variety.
• What do you feed a six year old? Anything they’ll eat.
• Halo3 nerds. At least some of us are.
• When to avoid a sound argument. Whenever your opponent has one, but you don’t.
• In word to add emphasis to text use the. Say what?
• What do you typ in 2 make the words bigger? When Texting Shortcuts and Search Collide…
• Sober sxsw We weren’t there this year, but if we had been…
• Torn attendant of the ankle. (Maybe you meant “tore a tendon of the ankle”???)
• Is different skills important this days? Yes they is. Specially for designers.

And one of our current favorites:

• Jobs working for the Lord. Nuff said.

posted by ted on Thursday, May 08, 2008