My friend Tom from Juneau, Alaska called me the other day.

Apparently, he was injured at work.

They were using a nail gun to assemble some 2×4’s, and the gun did the double bounce thing… sending a 16p nail into his hand.

It went through his index finger on his left hand got the next two fingers as well (through the bones), effectively fusing all 3 fingers together.

He sent me a pic of his x-ray… but it’s hard to see the finger bones (this is the second one he sent… it’s far eaiser to see than the first).

All I can say is… “Fucking OUCH!!”

Imagine if you will…

Your trapped in a plastic shell with a thin foam pad. You can’t move your body from your hips to your shoulders.

Now, imagine having an itch, or a bead of sweat run down the center of your back, and you’ve no way of scratching or wiping it away.

Next… imagine that you must wear a shirt under this brace, and during the course of the day, you sweat (because the plastic shell doesn’t let the heat out). Now the shirt becomes quite damp, and it begins to wrinkle under the shell. Those wrinkles stick to your skin, causing red marks all along your sides, across your belly, and down your back.

Welcome to my world.

My back brace sucks much butt. Since my wife has returned to work, I’m stuck in this damn thing from 7 am until 6 pm with no chance of getting out of it or having it adjusted. It better be placed perfectly on my body before she leaves or I’m screwed until she gets home.

But there’s hope… I only have to wear it until mid August (oh yeah… July and August ought to be just special! All that heat).

In other news… I’m trying to decide what to do for my youngest son’s birthday. I promised him a better computer and the thought was to give him mine and get myself a new one. After pricing what I want for myself… I think I may just order him a duplicate to what I currently have (AMD XP 2000+, 1GB DDR333, Geforce4 ti 4200 128mb DDR, 2x 20GB RAID1, 1x 60GB, 48x24x48 CD-RW, 52x CD, yadda, yadda, yadda). Of course, I’ll be ordering a better video card (and keeping it for myself).

My life has officially become dull as hell.

My wife reuturned to work today after 7 weeks off (she took 6 weeks off to recover from her surgery, and one more to help me after mine). I can’t even begin to describe how wonderful she has been to me durring all of this. At the risk of once again coming off as totally mushy… I am truely blessed to share my life with this woman.

My sister and her husband also moved out this weekend. They’ve been living with us since last november. They moved in for two reasons: to help take care of me and to save up money for a house. Well… my surgery is done and I’m doing well, and they saved enough to close on a house last week. They rented a U-Haul last weekend and packed up.

So… I’m on my own durring the days now. Since all I do is nap, this shouldn’t be too bad, though I’m going to go a little stir crazy as the weeks stretch on. I’m not even allowed out of the house until my post-surgery appointment with my neurosurgeon (scheduled for June 22nd).

Things should pick up on the website durring this time. As anyone who’s been reading this knows… the more free time I have on my hands, the more entertaining the website becomes. Well… “entertaining” may not be the right word, but you can expect oddness to abound!

But for the moment, I’m going to take a nap. Darn drugs make me sleepy.

It’s done nothing but rain here for the last few days. Yest erdays weather was the worst! The down pour was torrential last night. We received over a foot of hail in some areas and nearly 2 inches of rain (leaving everything saturated as hell). We even had two tornados touch down just west of town.

The rain continues to fall as I write this.

Which brings me to the odd thing I saw this morning. The back window of the house behind me was wide open when I went out for coffee and a cigarett at 5 am. Then, I noticed that the dogs who live there were running in and out of the side door of the house. Normally they’re kept in the fenced yard.

Odd.

I could see no one was at home, and between the back window and side door being wide open, it caused me some concern. So…. I called our local Crime Check number and reported it.

5 minutes later, there was a police crusier at my front door. They wanted me to point out the house because I didn’t know the houses address when I called them. The officer drove around the block and I watched from my deck as he and another officer walked around the house, looked in the open window, then went in the open door (with guns drawn).

How very exciting!

They stayed in there for about 15 minutes, then came out and attempted to round up the 3 dogs and get them back in the house. Later on, animal control showed up for the dogs, and the police locked up after them.

Apparently, the people who had lived there were renters and had decided to do a midnight move. Rather than take the dogs, they simply left them there (can you say “bastards!!”).

My wife and I are going to head over to the shelter and see if we can’t addopt one of them (after the 3 day waiting period).

My back is still pretty sore.

The brace seems to be doing its job, but it’s also creating some pretty damn nasty bruises on my butt from where it pinches when I sit. We’ve done a lot of adjusting, but I think it may be time to call the company who made it to see if they can’t flair it out a bit at the bottom. I’d post a pic of the bruising, but no one wants to see my butt.

It gets pretty boring around the house, and I’m not allowed to leave except to go to my neurosurgeon’s office (and my next appointment to check my progress isn’t until late next month). So I’ve been filling my time with movies, computer games, and anything else that is mildly entertaining. I broke down and installed MSN Messenger on my computer so I can IM friends and such.

Today’s plans: um…. nap followed by another attempt to get past the level in Far Cry that currently has me stuck (I can’t figure out how to get over the lava flows).

Hopefully, some sort of inspiration will strike me soon and I’ll post something clever on the site. Until then, you’re stuck with the usual mental diarrhea that has made this place famous.