I am going down the steps from my porch and misstep, and end up breaking my leg in three places right near my ankle. It is a Friday night, so I can’t get an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon until Monday.

When I go in for my appointment, I first see a nurse assistant with a very unique name. We talk about how it happened and my medical history. And because I’m female, she asks when my last period was. It has been almost a year. I’m on continuous birth control, despite not being sexually active, because during that time of the month, my migraines and fibromyalgia get to the point where I can’t function. She then goes to get the doctor, and from the room she has taken us to, we hear an argument break out over “who cancelled the appointment of the broken ankle girl.” I still don’t see how that’s possible, considering we made that appointment only an hour earlier. I end up being seen by another doctor with more of a specialty in what I need, so it works out and I forget about the weirdness.

Fast forward a week to when I can finally have surgery. I’m in the hospital gown, have an IV in, and I’m being asked the same questions again and again: spell my name, what’s my birth date, etc. Finally the nurse looks at me funny and looks at my ankle splint — which has a ton of padding and is massive — and tells me, “I know it seems obvious, but I need you to tell me what you’re here for.” I tell her to fix my ankle. She nods and tells me that that nurse assistant — I remember her unique name — had put me down as coming in for a hysterectomy. I’m not sure if she was trying to — inaccurately — note in my file that I’d had one because I hadn’t had my period in a year, or somehow managed to screw up why I was seeing an orthopedic surgeon when I had three broken bones. But I guess that will forever be a mystery.

A group of us got together to form a nudist club, and we would rent out the hot-tub suite of the local leisure centre for an hour or two on weekly basis. People who were using the suite before the hour we rented were naturally expected to leave before our rented hour.

This, of course, did not always happen. The worst instance of liberty-taking was when a middle-aged man from a culture where nudism is a shocking concept deliberately spent a long time showering, changing, and preparing to exit the suite, to such an extent that it was a good ten minutes into our rented time.

I, along with the other coordinator of this weekly event, approached this man a few times, explaining to him that he was encroaching into our time, and the members of the club wanted him either to leave immediately, or to pay his subscription and disrobe. Of course, he had no intention of doing so; he just wanted to hang around on the off chance that he could see naked women.

In the end, the aforementioned coordinator and I just undressed, and approached him again, naked this time. Nobody else had done so; it was just we two men. This time, the embarrassment of being made to interact with two naked men, and the increasingly remote prospect of cheap thrills on offer at the sight of bare breasts and women’s lady parts, was too much for him, and the slimy old toad left.

I have a side job in a social kind of institute aimed at senior citizens and teenagers.

As such, the institute has bought a 3D printer to use in projects aimed at the teenagers — projects I will be teaching, since I’m the person with experience in 3D printing and the likes.

For showing off and getting the teens interested, I’m working on a project that ties computer programming and 3D printing together, and I have to print a rather large object on the 3D printer for this project. “Rather large” refers to printing times of two to two and a half days. It’s one of the first prints I’m doing there, certainly the first one of such size.

So, after starting the print, I go to the people working full time in the institute and try to give them instructions regarding the print. I tell them things like, “Do me a favor and from time to time have a look at the print. It may go wrong and look like pasta or solid rocks. Stop the printer if that happens,” and, “Please don’t open the windows or leave the door in the room open for a longer time. If the print cools down, it tears off the print bed and is ruined,” and, “Don’t turn the power off to the printer in the evening. The print will take about 70 hours. Do not be worried about this.”

I return on the second day and check on my print. The thing’s about halfway done, so I figure the day after, it will be ready, and I plan to return in the evening of the next day. I chat a bit with my colleagues, again mentioning the above “printing rules.”

Sadly, things do not go as expected, so instead of being there the evening of the third day, I show up in the morning of the fourth. I meet the colleague I chatted with before, who is at the moment the only one in charge there for the whole week.

We greet, and they inform me I may not get into the room with the printer as they have a big educational event where they need about all rooms, so the printer room may not be available.

Also, because of this, they started setting up the rooms for the event the day before. So, the coworker went into the print room, noticed the rather warm room temperature caused by the printer, deduced the people setting up the rooms would most certainly try to open the windows and air the room… and stopped the printer by turning off the power.

This, in turn, caused it to cool down and tear off.

It was the one thing I did not explicitly mention.

My wife is a preschool teacher. While attending a seminar, she heard this story from a lecturer:

“We used to use macaroni glued to paper for art projects. One day I noticed my aide digging through the garbage for macaroni. She explained that she would soak it off the paper to feed her family, as she was on a tight budget. I felt bad that we were using food for art while others went hungry. So, we no longer use any foodstuffs in our art.”

The lecturer seemed very proud of herself, and never saw the irony.

Until I met my husband — a much more jaded person than I — my attitude when encountering a street person begging was: If they need it so much they’re begging for it, then they’re in a worse position than I am, and I’ll give it to them. I don’t care if it makes me a sucker, and I don’t care what they use it for.

I will never forget one birthday with him. At my request we went to a vegan restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where I was prepared to be dazzled by the food. I am a vegetarian; he is not.

It turned out to be not all that. The food was really greasy, and I couldn’t understand why it was so freaking popular, but we boxed up the expensive leftovers to go and headed back home.

We knew there would be a lot of street people on our way home, and hatched a plan to give the leftovers away, hopefully to salvage what was left of my birthday by doing something good, at least. But we didn’t see anybody begging for food in Oregon, and when we crossed over the border back to Washington, we were keeping a watchful eye out.

Finally, on one street corner, there was an apparently homeless teenager looking for handouts. We approached him and offered him the leftovers. He looked a bit wary and sad when he said, “I’m a vegetarian.” (For anyone who’s not a vegetarian, that may sound petty; like, “Well, if you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat it!” But as a nearly lifelong vegetarian myself, I can tell you: No, we won’t.)

I couldn’t believe my luck when I heard that. I told him, “It’s from [Restaurant]. It’s vegan!” I felt like the Universe had ordained this entire incident, and in our rear-view mirror we could see him eating out of the box as he walked away.