Found it! (Raiding the archives)

Back in the dim past of ancient myth and legend (I may be exaggerating slightly), I wrote an email to my friends and family describing the embarrassing (and entertaining to those who saw it live) breakage of my toe. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology (and a forum posting here) I am able to bring this email back to life for those few of my friends who had wished that they didn't hit the delete button back in 2005...

Without furher ado, I present that lovingly restored email:

OUCH!! (Holiday Update #3)

Those of you who know me best may have had some sort of sweep going as to how long it would take before I managed to do myself an injury while on holiday. The winner of the sweep is that person who nominated New Year's Eve as the date of my (literal) downfall.

We all (Jennie, the boys and Jennie's brother's family) went to West Edmonton Mall (the largest shopping mall in the world) to ring the new year in at the mall's water park. Yes, the mall really is that big, with a water park, an amusement park with roller coaster, a life-size replica of Christopher Columbus' ship the 'Santa Maria' and a dolphin show twice every day.

Jennie and I took both boys up to some of the taller waterslides and that is when things started to go wrong. Jennie, who was without her glasses and was therefore as blind as a bat, was (unreasonably) unwilling to send our overgown offspring down the first intermediate slide alone. I was talked into leading the way back down the (treacherously slippery) steps to ground level and then I would go back up to make a fool of myself. Graeme, who was holding my hand at the time, scooted a little bit ahead of me and I leant out to keep a grip on him while decending down a shortish flight of steps...

ZIP! My feet slipped out from under me and I landed on my arse and started bouncing down the remaining steps until my right foot was able to arrest my inelegant decent. My foot stopped achieved this by colliding with a post that held the (equally treacherously slippery) handrail up. The pain from this was enough to prompt all sorts of unseemly language that I won't repeat...

You can all stop laughing now.

I got to my feet (still swearing) and performed a quick damage check:
1. Moderately scraped left forearm.
2. Minor scraping on left side of lower back.
3. Amazingly painful collection of toes on right foot.

As I was able to bend all of the toes on the badly abused foot I figured that things were (while painful) mostly fine and the evening continued as normal - Which means that both Graeme and Nathan behaved in such an appalling manner as to bring to a premature end our evening's activities. A couple of painkillers back at the hotel and we spent the rest of the night in conversation. All was good as possible given the circumstances (Except for that incident where my brother-in-law slid a footstool in my direction, causing it to collide with my much abused foot).

The next day we all set off on our 5 hour drive from Edmonton to Fort McMurray where I experienced a windchill so amazingly cold that various delicate extremities retracted so far into my body that I had to swallow real hard in order to scratch them. It was here in what can best be described as the frigid hub of Hell that I first took my shoes off for the day (some 6 or 7 hours after putting them on) - I didn't realise that a single toe could have that many unpleasant looking colours on it. A couple of X-Rays at the local hospital revealed the truth, that my forth toe (the little piggy that got none) was, in fact, broken.

This sort of thing is, sadly, rather predictable...