Looking forward.

Wednesday during our daily briefing outside I asked Coby if I could run down to the bunkhouse to get the number for urgent care-- there's a humming in my ear that won't go away. He said yes, and I was there and back in less than a minute.

In that minute, the fifteen people sitting there left, leaving my backpack, which was promptly run over by a fire truck.

They say it's my fault. "Looks like somebody's got no situational awareness," they say with smirks. I've loathed this term since day one. Like "critical thinking," it's one of those words that unnecessarily vocabularizes a simple concept. In this case, "situational awareness" means "paying attention."

The next day while at the cutting and chipping site two hours away, right near the end of the day we moved on to yet another area. Everyone was tired and frustrated and I was picking up branches to put in the chipper. Someone put in a sizeable branch behind me when I wasn't looking, and when I turned around the branch rocked up and down in the feed wheel-- which they almost always do-- and hit me under the chin. It was the hardest anything's hit me in my life, and it just made this dense thunk sound in my head. I turned to Ned and asked him twice if my teeth were okay. He said yes both times. Then I spat up little bits of tooth. A chunk came out of the side of a back left molar. A bit flaked off the top of one of my lower left teeth, leaving a jagged edge. My top left canine got it the worst-- the entire point came off, the root nearly exposed. It hurt a bit to have cold air pass over it, to eat, to brush my teeth. (Oddly, I didn't spit it up but I didn't swallow it either. No idea where it went.) It didn't hurt, but the shattering of teeth was pretty emotionally jarring-- I sat in the truck and cried for a half-hour or so while the EMT-qualified firefighters took a look at me and asked me some neurological exam questions to make sure my head was on straight, ha.

The following day, Nate drove Sergio and I down into Boulder. My teeth got fixed up (though I might need a root canal in the future, which AmeriCorps wouldn't pay for if it's after I graduate, so I filled out a CA-1 Workman's Comp form and should be set for life). I bought the cheapest, junkiest cell phone AT&T had for $30. Sergio found out he has a sprained rotator cuff and can't lift more than 10 pounds for the next two months (even though he was playing basketball that morning). He's likely going to get transferred to another team, leaving me roommateless. So I guess these catastrophes were rectified acceptably.