In my last journal, when I said I was back from my holidays, that wasn't strictly correct. I was at my grandparents house in England, where we were staying for a few days.
Anyway, I was in my Grandfather's shed mucking about when I spotted some old blank cartridges for a nail gun he no longer had. Being the enterprising spirit in the field of blowing stuff up that I am, I decided to try and set one of these off. Seeing as they looked like rimfire cartridges, I held a nail with some pliers and used a hammer to hit it into the rim. Other than making a hole, it did nothing. I tried again, with the same result. I took it out of the vice to inspect it - I found out I was right in my initial assumption, the primer was in the rim of the cartridge. I came to the conclusion that the powder must have gotten damp at some point. I decided to set it off by holding lit over a lit match. It worked. I decided to take another blank to hold over a match, as the bang from this one wasn't particularly loud. Not enough pressure had built up, seeing as there were two holes in the side. So I took a new cartridge, and held it over the match...

Long story short, the doctors managed to remove the metal from my arm. It wasn't in too deep, but it hit right in the elbow, where there's several large veins, arteries, nerves and tendons. It could have been rather unfortunate. I think I'm also partially deaf in my right ear as well because of it. My ears were still ringing several hours later.

This is the shrapnel:And this is it with a 50 cent coin for scale: