Where does the time go? Seems like one minute it’s a week earlier then, BOOM, it’s today with lots of blurry time between the two.

What have I been doing? Who The Hell Knows? Time seems to run differently when I’m stuck around the house. One day I do dishes; next day laundry; next day dishes and laundry. I think I vacuumed somewhere in there one day. Keeping the fire going when it’s cool and sweating our asses off when it’s not but I have to keep the fire going anyway cause it will get cool.

Wait! I did take Phillip & Matthew out to the property to cut up some wood and bring it back to Phillip’s place this past Wednesday. Was nice being out there even if it was cool weather wise. We cut up a truck full was all. (Well, not the whole truck. Just the bed of the truck. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had any place to sit on the way back.)

GADS! I’m boring!

Still watching Smallville. This weeks episode was pretty good (Jimmy hunting the D0-Googer) but Chloe purposely killing that other guy kind of freaked me out. Bummer!

GADS! I’m Boring!

I had to go through my Subscribers list and kill off the obvious Spammer-assholes. Most of them seem to have G-Mail addresses so I just killed off everyone with a G-Mail address. It’s not like I’ve heard from a lot of them anyway.

Oh, my back seems to be doing better. Or is it just stuff I had going on with my leg? Anywho, since SWMBO bought me this new chair and I’m not resting my right leg against the support for the armrest I’m not having as much trouble with the numbness/burning around the house. Mostly now it only happens when I walk too long.

Stopped by the church today and donated another pint of blood. Figured it was the least I could do as I don’t pay tithing or anything. No, really. The Bloodmobile was there today and I almost always donate a pint of blood when they come around. Got a replacement 10 gallon pin for my new hat. (Accidently burned the last one up.) I don’t know that I’ll be donating anymore as they’re going to change things and make the paperwork even more invasive and time-consuming.

SWMBO took me to Baco Tell for dinner. It’s not real Mexican but I like it. Best part is her company though. We’ve been married 22 years this coming December. Wow! Now I’m sitting in the living room doing this and watching scary movies. It is Halloween! Thank Goodness we don’t have to worry about Trick-or-Treaters out here! We lived in our old house 11 years and had only one (1) stop by and here for 3 years and had one 2 years ago. I like that. But I’m old.

Lot of time has passed since my last post, I know. I’ve either been busy or just plain haven’t felt like posting.

Tried an experiment: Set up an e-mail account and joined one of those "Take Survey’s And Make Money At Home" places ($7) a couple of weeks ago. Almost 5000 spam e-mails later I have yet to take ONE survey. Initially, the site I joined (MakeMoneyAtHome.Com?) led me to a couple of pages with links to other places you could join to take the surveys. Talk about a round-robin of crap. Each link had me join to take survey’s that linked to other places to join to take surveys etc etc etc but never did get to take a survey. Now that mailbox if FULL of "Your Gift Card Is Waiting (with participation)" or "Get A Free TV (with participation)" offers ad nauseum. The "With Participation" part means that if you complete 3 silver offers, 2 gold offers & 2 platinum offers you get a "free" tv. But after spending a LOT of money fulfilling these offers you could have gone to COSTCO and bought the tv for half the price and a lot less hassle. Anyway, about to kill that e-mail address and write this up for Reader’s Digest or someone. What a joke. Except it really isn’t funny.

Weather’s been crappy mostly. Too cool for me. Been getting out to the property and running my digger around but I really don’t have a lot to do out there until we start to build. Our plans got through the engineer and should be on their way back to the architect. Gotta call the Contractor and see where he stands on his guesstimate.

Been helping friends move everything out of their moble home into their new garage so they can tear down his old moble home to put a new one in. I thought SWMBO and I were "pack rats" but these folks put us to shame! Most of their house was down to asiles between the junk they have stuffed in their house. I mean every "spare" inch of space was filled with something from floor to ceiling. I believe they are psychologically unable to throw anything away. I’ve found everything BUT a 15 year old stack of old phone books. (The oldest I found was 8 years old.) Don’t get me wrong: I like these folks. They’re great people. But they definitely have problems getting rid of stuff.

Been looking for a part-time job to take me through the winter. Not much out there for an old guy. I’m glad SWMBO has a great job but am starting to feel bad about not working. Oh, I do most of the housework and cooking (I make a great wife!) but I’m "the Man" and should be bringing in the bucks so SWMBO can be doing all that. Gads! We are the product of the time of our upbringing, aren’t we!?

Damned OPEC! The economy is going down the drain in most of the world and (it seems) especially the United States. Oil has dropped to $64 a barrel. Unemployment is on the rise and everybody has tightened their belts and OPEC is cutting back production to raise prices. Nothing else shows just how damned greedy these people can be! I’d love to invent something that would supply our energy needs enough to put the oil companies out of business overnight! All the oil companies but especially the ’ragheads’. Sorry, but ’ragheads’ are the feelings they promote with their insatiable demand for money at the expense of the rest of us. I did Desert Shield & Desert Storm, spent 7 months in Saudi and drove all over the place out there and didn’t see anything worth saving. If the Saudi’s were smart though they’d convert a lot of that empty sand and year round sunshine into vast solar farms and sell that electricity to the rest of the world.

Smallville has been pretty cool. I still watch it on "The CW" and still hate the commercials on Thursday nights and still download it Friday morning and watch it with said commercials. The sounds are fantastic when I listen to the show with earphones on! Wish I could do stuff like that. My attempts at making music for my time-lapse video’s (usually of clouds) have hit a ’sameness’ lately. I don’t know if it’s because of the limited amount of sound bytes I have to work with or if those are the only melodies running through my head. Probably a mixture of both. Anyway, I really like the way Smallville is heading. I really enjoyed Clark leaping to the top of a tall building in this last episode! Maybe he’s getting over his fear of heights…

Oh, SWMBO bought me a new telescope this week! It is so cool! A Celestron 144mm reflector, Before it got too cloudy I managed to see the bands of Jupiters atmosphere. Cool!

And I had an appointment with MY Doc to talk about the Degenerative Disc Disease and other things. He ordered a bunch of blood tests and the lab tech drew 5 tubes of blood. Got the results yesterday and all my results are midline except for the good and bad cholesterol. Bad cholesterol is way up. Good cholesterol is way down. Looks like I’m gonna have to try eating oatmeal for breakfast and do some other things to reverse that. But at least the screening for rectal cancer came out negative! (There’s always a bright spot!)

Wow. Making time-lapse videos of clouds and constructing music for them. Playing with Terragen. Ripping my dvd’s to avi files. Scanning my old pictures. Housework and cooking. Helping friends move. Moving dirt and making sure my drainage is working this year. Fixing up computers for friends. Doctor’s appointments. Laundry. Downloading Smallville, Supernatural, Sanctuary, Fringe and the new Knight Rider. Keeping the fire going in the woodstove and who knows what I,ve done and forgotten seems to keep me pretty busy. Life is good!

Sounds like something your computer would get, doesn’t it? "Yeah, I haven’t looked at these discs in years and I’ll bet they’ve degenerated some." But, a Nurse from Group Health called me up this afternoon and said that the results from my x-ray the other day shows Degenerative Disc Disease L5 through S1 and asked why I didn’t take the Rx for pain meds. Told her I wasn’t having any pain; just a numbness & burning sensation. (SWMBO later asked me "Well, isn’t burning pain?" Well, yes, sort of. I think of pain as being something you get when you break a bone or bruise yourself or something like that. What I have isn’t really pain, to me, but really annoying.) And that Narcs made me "feel funny" personality wise and won’t take them unless I’m really in pain. She made an appointment for me to see my Doc next Monday. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s some on DDD from Spine-health.com

A large part of many patients’ confusion is that the term “degenerative disc disease” sounds like a progressive, very threatening condition. However, this condition is not strictly degenerative and is not really a disease:

• Part of the confusion probably comes from the term "degenerative", which implies to most people that the symptoms will get worse with age. The term applies to the disc degenerating, but does not apply to the symptoms. While it is true that the disc degeneration is likely to progress over time, the low back pain from degenerative disc disease usually does not get worse and in fact usually gets better over time.
• Another source of confusion is probably created by the term "disease", which is actually a misnomer. Degenerative disc disease is not really a disease at all, but rather a degenerative condition that at times can produce pain from a damaged disc.

Disc degeneration is a natural part of aging and over time all people will exhibit changes in their discs consistent with a greater or lesser degree of degeneration. However, not all people will develop symptoms. In fact, degenerative disc disease is quite variable in its nature and severity.

And later in the article:

In addition to low back pain from degenerative disc disease, there may be leg pain, numbness and tingling. Even without pressure on the nerve root (a "pinched nerve"), other structures in the back can refer pain down the rear and into the legs. The nerves can become sensitized with inflammation from the proteins within the disc space and produce the sensation of numbness/tingling. Generally, the pain does not go below the knee.

These sensations, although worrisome and annoying, rarely indicate that there is any ongoing nerve root damage. However, any weakness in the leg muscles (such as foot drop) is an indicator of some nerve root damage.

So, it appears it’s not something I have to get overly excited about as long as I take care of myself. Cool!

Not much else going on around here. Been staying home mostly as the weather is really starting to suck. And I really don’t have that much to do at the property. Even with gas prices coming down I don’t want to "waste" gas driving out there and back unless I actually accomplish something. So I’ve been doing things around the house and getting all the scans of family pictures in one place so I can finally see what the hell I’ve accomplished there. I was really surprised how many duplicates I had of pictures & video’s! Daymn!

But, occasionally, I have to. Been having this numb/burning feeling on the lateral part of my right thigh. Had it off and on for a long time but lately it’s been getting worse. Burns when I sit too long or walk too long. I figured it was just age finally getting to me; but decided to e-mail my Doc cause it has been getting worse lately. He e-mailed me back telling me to make an appointment ASAP. I e-mailed back that maybe it’s this chair I spend so much time in sitting in front of this computer and that I’d change chairs and if it was still bothering me in a month I’d make an appointment. At 0830 this morning a Nurse called me and said that my Doc wanted me in today. ???

So I made an appointment for 1450 And I made it rain and all. Didn’t get to see MY Doc though; he was off today. But the Doc I did see started talking about L3 Disk Degeneration and wanting x-rays. Checked me out physically and all my Range Of Motion (ROM) is normal (for an old guy) and I have absolutely no other signs or symptoms except for this burning sensation in my thigh. Hell, even my blood pressure is pretty good for a guy my age. So he ordered lumbar x-rays and said that if it got any worse he’d order some kind of "nerve" tests. Apparently, in these "nerve" tests they stick a needle in your upper thigh, another needle in your lower leg and apply electricity until you yell "Uncle!". Brrr. Gives me chills just to think about it.

So, anywho, this Doc tries to give a Rx for a narc to control the pain. I turned it down cause I’m not having anything you’d call Pain; just this burning sensation. Told him to just leave the Rx on the books and I’d pick it up if I needed it. I hate taking drugs though! Narcotics make me feel ’funny’ personality wise. But I will go with his instructions to avoid heavy lifting or bending over for awhile to give the disk time to heal; if that’s the problem. (Had to get it in writing though for SWMBO. Hey, would YOU take MY word for it?!)

X-Ray machine was cool though. They don’t use film anymore. The ’cassette’ that used to hold film now holds something else and they can take it right to a computer and look at your x-ray right then. The X-Ray Tech showed me mine. Spine looked normal to me except for these little pointy spikes coming off the edges of some of the vertebrae (which may be the source of the problem also).

Got home kind of late and SWMBO was hungry so she took me to McDonalds for dinner. Then we stopped by Office Depot and found a chair to replace my computer chair. $100! Phew! Of course, I had to lift it to put it into her Kia then lift if out of the Kia and carry it into the house and unpack it and build it. Glad I didn’t have to do any heavy lifting or anything…

Anywho, that’s about it around here. Heard some thunder mixed in with the rain earlier today. Rained a bit. Hard at times. Spent an hour working on a friends computer until I just couldn’t take his constant jabbering anymore. How do you tell some one that you don’t want to hear a sound from them unless you ask them a direct question cause you’re concentrating on the problem the computer is having? Well, it didn’t work.

Smallville was pretty cool tonight. Chloe finally got to tell Clark how she ’used’ to feel about him. They need to tell Jimmy about Clark though so Jimmy will know what’s going on when she disappears to help Clark. I just can’t warm up to this person that took over for Lex though… Even though Clark seems to be more at-home with his abilities he really needs to learn to FLY!