The Painful Hole In My Finger

...is a ruptured blister caused by my rake. The rake saw considerable use yesterday because my lawn mower did not pick up any of the pine needles on the front lawn. So I raked them up, to re-expose the grass to the sun. I collected a stack of needles three feet high. A few pine needles, no big deal. But the front lawn was starting to look like the slopes of the mountains up in the Angeles National Forest, and that grass tends to die pretty quickly.