First Aid Kits, The Kite Runner, and Cost Plus World Market

I went to see The Kite Runner a couple nights ago. It's a good movie, but the ending isn't quite as dramatic as in the book so I went away disappointed. There were some things left out, for the sake of time I suppose, but in the movie you didn't get the sense that there was a fight to the death, a struggle to get to the ending that you got in the book. All the scenes with the two main characters as young boys were incredibly well done, the rest of the movie just didn't hold up to that same quality. Knowing that I wanted to see the movie, I also reread the book last week. This reading was my third or fourth time through, funny how after the first time reading a book one is able to catch so many more of the writer's hints and how so many things mentioned for seemingly no reason come back to explain things later. A mark of great storytelling ... just enough details to describe the sounds, smells, landscape of Afghanistan as it existed prior to the Russian invasion, all the details necessary to continue the story. I've been torn over whether to lend this book to anyone or keep it safely on my shelf, but I've just decided to bring it to work and share it with my neighbor. I think.

Saturday evening was very dramatic at our house as Anna suffered scary cuts to two of her fingers. The three of us were hanging out in the kitchen while Edwin was making dinner, and Anna was playing with the utensils in the drawer when she grabbed part of a vegetable slicer and got her fingers caught in it. I gasped and rushed over to her, got her fingers free as quickly as I could and held them under running water at the kitchen sink. At first, Edwin just got a band aid (!!!) but then I yelled to him to get the first aid kit we keep in the upstairs bathroom as I could see with all the blood a band aid wasn't going to be enough. Anna stayed pretty calm until the worst had passed, I stayed calm until I turned her fingers over and saw all the blood running down her hand and then it was a struggle to hold it together. Once I could tell she hadn't cut a finger off, or cut the tips of her fingers off that helped immensely. Eventually I wound gauze around her fingers and secured it into place with lots of surgical tape. The amount of blood was unbelievable to be coming from such little fingers.

Anna left the gauze and tape alone, so I didn't feel a strong need to change it until tonight. I figured once we got home, I could take the old stuff off and get a better look, give her wounded fingers some air. After her bath I would get out the gauze again if I needed to, which I did. Anna was hysterical at the thought and unfortunately I couldn't get her to calm down and cooperate so I basically got everything ready to go, pinned her down, and while Anna did her best to kick and scream herself out of my arms I rebandaged her fingers. Hopefully she will leave these new bandages alone so they can stay put until the next bath. Poor girl. I told her when she's all healed we'll go out for ice cream to celebrate.

Needless to say, the first aid kit really came through for us. I always insist that Edwin and Saskia take it with them when they go camping, and this incident has reminded me that I've always intended to get a new one to keep in my car. Years ago when I first bought it, I got a typical response from Edwin: "when would we ever use that?" as in "what a waste of money because we'll never use it". Well, you just never know what could happen, why not have one around? Target has them pretty cheap, as does Walgreens. What would we have done without one?

Anyway, so I went to Cost Plus World Market yesterday. As with a grocery store, I must say I recommend not going to this store hungry. I picked up a big bag of Swedish fish (all red), a bag of chips (I never buy chips), a jar of Nutella-like goodness, a salty sweet snack mix, chocolate for Easter (I got most of my Christmas chocolate here) and a bag of little wafer-like cookies which I think is Dutch. Oh my. No, I didn't eat everything but I've gotten a great start on the Swedish fish and the snack mix. So much so I wasn't really hungry for dinner tonight. Not good. I was hoping I'd get lucky and find a wall hanging for our downstairs bathroom. The two pictures of shells that are in our upstairs bathroom I found at World Market. No luck.

I just picked up a new book at the library, a book that I think will be very interesting called The Sociopath Next Door. I'm hoping this book will lead me to other books about personality disorders, I'm not sure if I've come across many sociopaths (the book claims 1 in 25 people are sociopaths, so I probably have) but I feel pretty confident that I've come across narcissists and histrionics. Of course I'm the last person to figure those things out, that I've befriended the person who everyone else, with good reason, avoids like the plague. So we'll see what I learn from this book and apply to my everyday life.