That Time I Fell to my Death

I totally fell to my death the other day.  Other than the "to the death" part, that statement is totally accurate.  I fell down like a boss.  Also an accurate statement minus, "like a boss."

So here's the story.

I went to take out the recycling.  It doesn't seem like that difficult of a task, but I assure you it was.

My mission was simple.  I just had to make it from the porch (where I was standing when I took the picture) to the blue recycling can in the top right.

It didn't seem like a hard mission. But that's because I didn't know I would encounter the great terror of my life.

This may not look like a terror, but that's exactly why it was terrible.  It looks like a patch of sidewalk, but it's actually a patch of death.

I stepped on the patch of death and suddenly my legs were no longer underneath me.  My body instantly went from being vertical to being horizontal.  Apparently, my strategy for dealing with what I call "sudden horizontal syndrome" was to fling my arms out wildly.  The net result of this flinging was that I threw the can of recycling ten feet.

As my horizontal body fell to the ground, my head found a good landing spot, right on top of one of our little solar lights.  Luckily, the light crumpled before my head did.

The light lost, but my head didn't feel like a winner.

This is a diagram of the aftermath (click to enlarge).  The can is a good 15 feet from its former contents.

The good news is that I survived.  I just had to clean up a whole bunch of trash from our front yard and deal with a skinned knee.  The moral of the story is that no matter how safe it seems to take the recycling out, don't do it.  It's not safe.  At least it's not safe from November to February.