The Slice: Another good reason to skip yard work

Yard work can be dangerous.

“I was in my large garden cutting some stubborn weeds with my pocketknife,” wrote Jim Schmidt. “I went to my storage shed to get something and when I opened the door several wasps flew out and attacked my nose.

“Grabbing my nose, I ran to the house to get first-aid from my wife. Laughing, she started applying baking soda to my nose when all at once she noticed blood spurting onto the bathroom wall. There was a small wound on my ankle and an artery had been cut.

“On our way to the ER we figured out that when the wasps stung I dropped the pocketknife which caught in my pants cuff and, on the run to the house, flipped and stabbed my ankle. The ER doctor and nurses were quite amused.”

Barb Smith once got a shoe caught on a shovel. She wound up falling and needed back surgery as a result. “And all my husband could say was, ‘How do you get stuck in a shovel, it has no moving parts!’ ”

Dee Hunter was working in her yard when she stepped in a hole and fell, ripping up one knee in the process.

•A Spokane skyscraper: Tom Richardson is not in favor. “They are usually ugly,” he wrote. “Downtown Seattle has been ruined by them. They block the sun and put streets in perpetual shade. Any building over six or seven stories is too high.”

But Doug Schwab understood why I thought it could be a good thing. “I have had similar thoughts about a very tall building in Spokane, probably since Expo ’74,” he said. “I guess I wanted the city to seem more like a big city to the rest of the world.”

No one, however, mentioned my unstated concern that a Spokane skyscraper could give us a skyline that makes it look as if we are flipping off the whole country.

Oh, by the way, I know there was an Empire State Building here. (See The Slice, April 10, 2007.)

And I know the subject of a Spokane skyscraper came up in the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” (See The Slice, Oct. 19, 2006.)

•Speaking of Spokane as a true city: Janet Culbertson and several others noted that the Sunday crossword puzzle referred to Spokane as a “Pacific Northwest metropolis.”

•Please remit: A reader named Jody in Sandpoint said she received a payment-due notice from The Spokesman-Review saying that she owed $0.00.

“So I sent my check in the amount of $0.00,” she wrote.

That should square things.

•Today’s Slice question: What’s the worst score you ever saw a sober adult roll up in bowling?