Flossing my toes

It's finally Friday and I just finished shoving dental floss up underneath an ingrown toenail. Usually it's my big toes that get the ingrown nails and I can shove tiny bits of cotton up under the nail to encourage it to grow away from the toe. I couldn't fathom getting cotton up under my third toenail so I figured I'd just pick at it everyday. Internet to the rescue- hey, dental floss works too! It took me a minute or two to figure out how exactly to get dental floss under my toenail and to get it to stay, but with a curved fingernail tool and a little bit of guts, I've managed to get it up under there, put neosporin in it and bandaged it up.

Summer has evolved from shorts and sandals to long pants and heavy boots. For some reason my boots don't seem to fit this year. Either the leather got too cold and shrunk (it does that you know) or my feet are starting to collapse and flatten out, thus making them longer. I suppose fire season is not a good time to figure this out. So my toe is red and angry, it's been flossed and bandaged and I'm thinking I'll need to buy a pair of boot stretchers. They're good to have on assignment anyway being as feet swell at night and boots shrink in the cold night air. Makes for a little taste of hell at 5am. I guess it's not so much that feet swell at night, it's more like they try to swell during the day but can't actually do so until you take off the tight leather boots and give them room. Whatever the case is, boots don't fit well in the morning. Ask any wildland firefighter.

Given my current predicament, I've decided to put out an ad for some hired help. Wanted: gardener/maid/ingrown toenail specialist who is also fairly comfortable painting houses, sanding decks and searching a human body for ticks. Fluent in massage a plus. Pay is meager- room and board plus a smidgeon of food. If you can grow enough vegetables for the both of us, you can eat that too. Otherwise I might be able to smuggle home a packet of jalapeno cheese from an MRE.