Double ouch

This morning, while attempting to take a shower, my foot slipped on the shower mat which wasn't "sucked" properly to the bottom of the shower stall but was just lying there. Result: a hurt shin and a hurt toe.

The hurt shin went away fairly quickly, but the toe continued to hurt.

At first, I thought it was pressure on the nail causing the nailbed to hurt, but when Stella looked at it around lunchtime, the area around the first joint (knuckle?) had turned a lovely purple.

This evening, I went to get it X-rayed in case it was broken, though that seems not to be the case; the official diagnosis is Prellung ("contusion", aka "(bad) bruise"). Keep cool, don't put weight on it if you can avoid it, take ibuprofen t.i.d. and wait until it gets better. (When asked how long that would take, she said "it should get better a bit each day", implying that it depends on your definition of "it's completely fine again now", but she also mentioned that it depended on things such as how the area was treated.)

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In only-vaguely-related news, on the way back from the ER[*], I tried to get some chocolate out of a vending machine, and it ate my €2, along with the €0.20 I stuck in afterwards in a vain attempt to knock the coin onto the right track. I is annoyed.

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[*] ISTR reading that this (= emergency room) is an American term, but can't think of the British equivalent just now. Anyone?

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Also vaguely related: our ward's Christmas celebration was today, and everyone was asked to dress up "Biblically".

It was wonderful: stalls with fake-Oriental-script signs (fake-Devanagari, unfortunately, rather than fake-Hebrew/Aramaic), a tax collector, a nativity play, and hymns. Everyone got a little sack of "gold coins" to spend at the food and drink stalls as well as to pay the tax collector with. (Who also ended up distributing presents to the children present.)

And Jeva had kindly leant me a walking staff, to go along with my planned "shepherd" costume (a dressing gown over my shirt)... which ended up being useful during the day, not just decoration.

(The bishop had, imaginatively I thought, dressed up as a beggar. Quite a change from the typical "shepherd" look many of the others sported, if they had dressed up at all.)

Azvenzkranzkerzenglanz

Stella looked for an Advent wreath the other day, but couldn't find one. So she decided to make her own.

Here's the result:

( Two images under the cut )

She said that she estimates a wreath that size with those decorations would cost about €20 in a shop; she paid about €5 for the raw materials.

So yay! We have an Advent wreath again this year.

(For those of you who are not familiar with Advent wreaths: they're a German(?) custom, whereby one candle is lit on the first Sunday in Advent (the four weeks leading up to Christmas), two candles on the second Sunday (i.e. the first one plus another, new one), three on the third, and four on the fourth. Symbolising, I suppose, how things get lighter and lighter leading up to the coming into the world of the Light Himself, or something like that. Or celebrating the upcoming solstice and the fact that days will soon start getting longer again, for all I know. At any rate, I think it's a nice tradition.)