A Sunday Complaint

I was going to sit on the porch and work on Lauderdale this evening, but the words just aren't coming, so I might as well put something on this poor neglected blog.

I'm sorry I've been neglecting you, blogosphere. It isn't intentional, really. It's just that I've got a girlfriend for the first time in eons, and frankly I'd rather spend time with her than the intarweb. You understand. What you may not understand is how I ended up with a girlfriend. I'm not sure I understand it myself, so if you come up with a good answer, please let me know.

I've also done something bad to my back again, only I don't understand at all what it is. After getting better for two months, in the last week or so it's just become more and more painful, more and more limiting, and then Friday night it was positively awful. I'd have liked to take my girl out to a club or something, but I could only lie on the couch. Saturday morning it was better, but not much. I went to the pottery studio, and that didn't seem to bother my back much at all. I made three cockroach traps, and tried to make some other things but mussed them all up. I did put a bunch of stuff in the bisque kiln so I can glaze it before the big summer sale in July.

Then I went to the gym. I hadn't gone on Friday because I didn't feel like staying at the base, so I was going to Friday's workout on Saturday. It's just arms, so it's not a big deal, and I was sure there was no way I could hurt my back. Ha! I was doing narrow-grip chins when pain shot up the left side of my lower back, like someone had reached in there to grab the lower-back muscle and ripped it right off the bone.

Needless to say I stopped and came home. But the exercise I was doing in no way uses the lower back. I have no idea what happened. I went to my girlfriend's house for a big lasagna dinner (it was going to be a cookout but she changed plans earlier in the week; good thing too since our friend Alberto was busy dropping rain all over town all evening and a cookout would have been very bad) and couldn't get comfortable. No matter how I sat or stood my back was killing me. Later I tried lying down on my back and my stomach and still couldn't make it stop hurting. I ended up coming home not long after the guests left, not what we'd hoped to do.

So of course today it's not bothering me all that much. I'm loath to do anything even remotely strenuous lest I strain it again. I have a physical therapy appointment tomorrow morning, for which I kind of hoped I'd be in the same excruciating pain I'd been in Saturday night, but of course like anything broken my back will be just fine when I take it in to the shop.

Earlier this afternoon I got to drive in to work and take care of a few things on the off chance we end up evacuating the jets to Wichita. I drove in right during one of Alberto's rain squalls and my was it fun. Waves were breaking against the Bayshore seawall high enough that there was a constant spray over the balustrade and four inches of standing water in the northbound lanes. And this was just an early rain squall from a very weak storm. How exciting! When the fat part of the season gets here we'll really have ourselves a party!