Well, here's the responsible party:
That's Annie, our sweet but very big and very dumb dog.
Annie had just concluded stealing a snack from my toddler, Harry. I made a grab for her collar, and at the last second she changed direction. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but I must have jammed my finger just the right way on her collar, shoulder, or perhaps her very thick, furry skull.
I didn't notice it at the time, but a few minutes later I realized my finger hurt, and I discovered, most unpleasantly, that part of it was now bending in the wrong direction. Ouch!
Result (after some X-rays): in my right ring finger, the bone closest to the tip had literally snapped. The X-ray looks something like this:
fingertip xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxOOOxxxxxxxxx...[rest of finger]
^ ^
| |
| |
break last knuckle
Looks like I'll be in a splint until late March and we'll see how
things go from there.
Incidentally, one of the results of this experience is that I've discovered a cool service called Jott, which uses speech recognition (plus a big call center of human transcribers in India for quality assurance) to allow you to phone in a message up to 30 seconds long and have the text e-mailed to your intended recipient.