Oddball Update

I can’t believe I haven’t posted on this site yet THIS YEAR! Ha…granted, the year is only 10 days old, but given all that’s happened in those 10 short days…well, suffice it to say, there’s a lot to catch up on.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the year, shall we? First of all, I’d like to wish my wife a belated, but very happy, birthday. Obviously I didn’t just now remember this, but I hadn’t posted anything on the site at the time. Here’s to another wonderful year together, with success and—hopefully—a little less chaos surrounding us!

Additionally, the “news of the moment” is that this Saturday I injured my back severely while moving furniture around. One of our Christmas gifts from my parents was a new couch to put in front of our big screen TV, and in the process of arranging the room and its contents just the way we wanted them, I must have used some rather “unsafe heavy lifting practices” which resulted, by that evening, in a complete and total inability for me to use my lower back muscles. I ended up either sitting perfectly still or laying flat on the bed. Anything else was major agony. And I don’t even want to begin to describe the spectacle of trying to get out of bed Sunday morning.

Well, by the time I realized that it was a day later and my condition wasn’t any better—hell, it was worse, if anything—I decided to take the leap and head down to the emergency room. Yeah, the dreaded NCH emergency room during snowbird season. Home of wait times that could see you dead of blood loss if your emergency had anything to do with open wounds. But there we went. After all, I didn’t know if I’d torn a ligament or what. After waiting about four and a half hours—standing up, I might add, since the pain that accompanied any attempt to sit down was like a preview of the Apocalypse—I got some prescriptions for muscle relaxants, steroids and pain killers and was sent out of there.

I’ve been on the drugs since late Sunday, and my condition is markedly improved. I can tell that some of it is propped up by the medicine, since I start feeling a bit stiffer and more painful as “pill times” approach, but I’m definitely recovering quickly. There are still some things I can’t do, however. Like, right now, for instance, all the text on my monitor is “fuzzing” as it sometimes does, the only remedy to which is to clap your hands on the side of the mother-loving thing until it stops. (Yeah, real great quality on this monitor, it seems.) Except that right now it hurts to lean forward, so I can’t slap the monitor. It’s sitting there, laughing at the superior intellect. Mocking my inability to reach out and strike it, and the text is just fuzzin’ away. Well, it’s getting better now. The text, I mean, not my back. It seems to come and go.

Anyway, I didn’t go to work today, and I’m not going tomorrow either. Getting in and out of a car is major pain—hell, on Sunday, I physically could not get into the Mazda’s front seat and had to kind of slingshot myself into the back seat instead—to say nothing of a low-slung sportster like the Trans Am. I think KITT would actually be easier on my back than the T/A. But either way all of my meds warn me not to “operate heavy machinery” while I’m taking them, which unlike most drivers, I’m actually going to obey. Since I set up a VPN into the office, I can do all my work from home anyhow. And I’m still in need of getting up and taking theraputic walks every 20-30 minutes. I’ll most likely be back at the office on Wednesday—just in time to finish out an abruptly shortened week (heh heh) and enjoy next Monday off. It’s Martin Luther King Day, you recall. Yeah, we get that day off.

So, after all the hardship I’ve suffered at its hand, how about I show off that couch we got?

Ever since we got the big screen Toshiba we haven’t had anything decent to sit on while watching it. Now that void has been filled. This is a Berkline leather sectional that has two recliners next to each other on the end facing the TV, as well as a queen-size sleeper at the other end. (So now when my friends come down from Michigan, nobody will have to sleep in a recliner.) We also got that nifty cocktail table that seems to match everything quite well, and we added a decorative rug that we already had (but in a different room). Toss in some pillows picked out of a bin at HomeGoods and you’ve got a nice little setup. We’d like to finish it off with a stylish floor lamp of some kind in the back corner behind the wedge piece. In fact we were on our way to pick out just such a lamp on Saturday when my back basically gave out. (Somebody at work has already taken to calling me “The Gimp.”)

Anyway, there’s TONS more to blather about here, but I’ll save it for later. I’ll make some notes, though, so I don’t forget: XM radio, the new Battlestar Galactica, Linux rescuing the 486…yeah, I said Linux! Maybe I’ll write about that tomorrow…

Categorized as Life