My wife's birthday was yesterday. Unfortunately, she's off at violin camp with 2/3 of my children, so we could only communicate by phone. She knows what she's getting, though; I'm building her a computer to do some video editing on.

Last night, as I tried to copy the drive data from the old, slow drives onto the new, 320GB SATA drive, one of them threw a consistent I/O error. That meant putting it back in the old computer to run chkdsk, since I'm using a Linux LiveCD for the disk copy (for the other geeks out there: eLive and dyne:bolic, both of which recognize all the new hardware and provide dd, but neither of which provide dd_rescue).

To save time, I assembled the old computer only as far as necessary. Then came the moment of stupidity...

Instead of getting up off the floor and picking up the computer, I tried to get up with the computer in one hand. That was unstable, and I had to grab on with both hands. The computer is an HP (the worst case design in the world; I actually had to remove the swing-out motherboard tray to get to the hard drives), and it was rather unstable. The floor was also messy, and these two circumstances combined to wrest the computer from my hands at the precise moment that the floor tried to move under my feet. I wound up slamming the computer down on its stand sideways.

As I stood there, stunned, wondering if I'd managed to break anything, I realized that my right hand hurt. I thought it was just the sting of the slap, but I soon realized that one of the case's sharp edges had taken a chunk out of my right thumb. On the side of the joint. It was narrow, but deep.

There was only a drop of blood, and I was amazed at how thick my skin must be. Then the blood started spreading, and I wondered where the antibiotic ointment could be. It took ten minutes to find a decent bandage (I have to go buy some triple-anti-b, as we don't seem to have any in the house), by which time I had managed to get blobs of blood in various places on my right hand.

The rest of the evening was relatively uneventful. Windows managed to find a few bad clusters during a chkdsk /r, I realized I had messed up the partitioning on the new drive, I set everything up to begin the (re)copy of the working drive's data, and I went to bed.

As I'm driving Tatiana to swim team practice the next morning, Erica calls me. We go through the usual "good morning" stuff, and then she asks me timidly, "You didn't cut yourself and bleed all over everything, did you? I just dreamed that."

Well, yeah, I kinda did. Not quite as badly as her dream, but enough to cause me some mental trauma. I was floored. She couldn't believe I wasn't joking, so I told her the whole story.

Quite the coincidence. I just hope that next time she's psychic, she's precognitive instead of telempathic.