Freedom!

Mom gave me a cute silver ring on Sunday for Easter--it was a teensy bit too small, but I figured I might be retaining water (with all the salt I eat, that's usually a fair assumption) and it might fit better later. On Thursday evening, I absentmindedly put the ring on the middle finger of my right hand. It slid on just fine, so I thought nothing of it. Dun dun dunnnnn....

I'm sure my astute readers have already figured out where this is going.

Yeah, on Thursday night as I was laying in bed I realized that the ring was a little uncomfortable (it has a pretty wide band). I decided to take it off before going to sleep. Heh. Right. I pulled on the not-so-cute-anymore ring. I wiggled it around, I twisted it. Nothing. I held my finger under cold water. Nope. Slathered on some slippery soap. Nuh uh. By that time, my finger was so swollen that the only thing I could do was give it a rest and try again the next day. Trying to sleep with a finger that's throbbing as a direct result of one's own stupidity is not as fun as it sounds.

On Friday, we pulled out all the stops. First I iced my finger for a good half hour, hoping that whatever residual swelling I had would go down. Then we wrapped the biggest part of my finger in packing tape, hoping to push enough blood out of the way to get the ring off. Yeah, that didn't work so well. Then we tried using shrink wrap--if you're not familiar with Ty's fondness for shrink wrap, you don't know him very well. That didn't work either, and it hurt like Texas when he tried to tear the shrink wrap off the roll. More ice--this time for pain relief, not finger shrinkage.

By Sunday, I had given up. Cutting back on the salt didn't work...not because it didn't make my fingers shrink but because I'm physically incapable of cutting back on salt. (I'm like that scary hot lady/hairy freak creature on that one old school Star Trek episode where she goes around killing red shirts for the salt in their blood. Evidently salt is just as vital to my survival as oxygen--and much tastier.) Yep, I'd pretty much resigned myself to wearing this now-repulsively-ugly ring till I died or my finger fell off, whichever came first. It wasn't so tight that it caused discoloration or anything--any discoloration was a direct result of the abuse I'd been inflicting upon it. So I have a couple of dents on my finger where the edges of the ring dug in...I can live with that. The blood supply seemed relatively uncompromised, so I was pretty sure I'd get used to it in time. I stopped messing with it and obsessing over it and just got on with my life.

Then today (Tuesday) I was in my boss's office whining about my ring predicament and I decided to show her just how tight the little sucker was. Guess what came off with a minimum of twisting and tugging? No, not my finger. The ring! YAY!

Although, in retrospect, I'm a little (illogically) miffed that my "look how tight this ring is" demonstration did ye olde crash and burn. It was sort of like getting an IT guy to come look at your computer because it keeps freezing up on you, but when he comes to check the stupid thing, it works like a champ--you're glad it works, but it's still kind of irritating. I bet if I'd tried to show Audra how tight my ring was on Friday it would have come off then. But then I wouldn't have had all that fun over the weekend.