My experiences over the last week have given me an interesting story idea.

Let's be honest. This idea has been rolling in my head for a few weeks, and like many others, it's been stuck there like coins in a piggybank.

When you get pretty seriously injured - not "ambulance" serious, but ER serious (short version: I dislocated my ankle, and popped it back it almost immediately, but since I failed the Ottawa ankle rules, I had to get immediate medical attention (and an X-ray, which returned no fractures (yay!)), and you gotta head to Cook County Hospital, which is infamous for its extensive waits for service (and, by the way, Crichton's inspiration for ER), your adrenaline pumps ump, your stress level rockets up, and you try to figure out ways to deal with the agony.. or distract yourself from it.

I had two Big Ideas while waiting for nearly ten hours (!) for ER care. One was for a tadpole-style three-wheeled electric-assisted recumbent velomobile. (Translation: It has two steering wheels in front, it is fully encased in an aerodynamic shell, and has some electric power for helping power the vehicle, particularly with uphills.) Now, I have no background in engineering beyond being a geek-of-all-trades, but I came up with some basic ideas that seem to work, and I'm trying to CAD them out to see their viability.

The second idea - an older one dislodged from the metaphorical piggy bank with the hammer smash of intense pain eminating from my leg (which, by the way, fully obfuscated the pain from a fully bruised and scraped forearm deriving from my fall - 120 kilos of girth fall down hard) - is an introvert's ultimate fiction work.

The zero of the idea is that I basically had the Worst Week Ever, starting with the serious ankle fall and wrist damage, with a dash of "locked myself outta my house with no one I know who has a spare within the same timezone" (which did happen to me, by the way, in real life - pain is highly distracting), topped off with some other fictions and capitalized with some son of a bitch screaming down Lincoln Avenue at 60 mph while I'm trying to cross the street on my damned crutches. (Such antipedestrian behavior is hypercommon there. Punchline? There's a block-long police station there! Never seen a cop craft a citation for such behavior!)

Anyways, what happens after that injury is much more interesting.

I'll post the strips within a week so as not to spoil the surprise.

Hope to get some input about this.