Whoa! Another post!
I wonder if anyone actually looks at this anymore with my extended absence and all.
Anyways, things for me are busy, hectic, crazy, depressing, exhausting, expensive and painful… Aren’t you glad you asked?
So far the grand total for my trip to the emergency room a month ago has topped $6000 and another bill just came in today for $285 … I’m calculating that my little trip is now in the $1500 an hour range and still climbing.
You’d figure for $6000 they could have at least made up something fancy rather than a simple “We don’t know; go see a chiropractor”…
The real gem in the steaming pile of medical bills is the $2200 for 12 minutes in a CT scanner – $183 a minute.
I’m in the wrong business… Or is that the wrong country?
Oh well, and people wonder why I abstain from routine doctor visits: I’ve had a few in 37 years and –every single time- they simply cannot tell me what the issue is and it winds up costing me right around a year’s worth of car payments for a series of shrugs and confused looks.
Grr…
Ok, so I’ve been busy – really busy – for the last 4 weeks. Between learning all about DSL communications technology (DSLAM to be specific), being the general purpose help desk at work, writing proposals to test the impossible, writing the software to do those impossible tests, and then running those tests for the likes of Coors Brewing Company… I’ve pretty much resigned myself to never doing another creative thing ever again.
Add to this the fact that I haven’t had the time to go to the above mentioned chiropractor till this morning and have been living with a pain in my neck, upper back, and a roaring headache for a month now – it’s obvious that I haven’t been the most pleasant being to be around and you all haven’t missed much.
The good news is the trip to the chiropractor this morning actually did me some good. He poked and prodded, took a series of x-rays to look over this weekend, then put me on this cool bed-thing that was warm and had some high powered roller in it that crawled up and down my back for about 15 minutes. He then did some contortionist thing with me that made the achy spot between my shoulders go off like a shotgun and left me unable to get up for a few minutes, but for the first time in a month the pain in my back went away…
After so long with it, I had almost forgotten what it was like to stand up strait and not hurt.
I have to go back Monday morning, and will probably be there once a week for a few months, but he seems convinced that there’s nothing permanently messed up. This is before he looks at the x-rays though, so who knows.
Oh, and of course now that I have insurance, it doesn’t cover chiropractic visits…
Yeah, that sucking sound you hear is my savings going right into the crapper.
At least the doctor I’m seeing now seems to ‘get’ the crap I’ve been through so far and didn’t bill me for the visit today beyond the $50 to get the x-rays developed. Future visits will run be $45 each though… I can live with that I guess if it makes the pain go away.
Other than that, the car is running fine – though with gas prices these days it runs me about $0.10 a mile to operate the car, so needless to say I don’t drive anywhere but work and back anymore.
I sold my old computer, bought a laptop, sold the laptop and built a new computer in the last 30 days. The new machine is pretty much “stupidly fast”: Dual core 4800+ AMD with a 512M 6800GT and 4 gigs of uber-ram in a case slightly bigger than a regulation lunch box. As soon as I can sit in front of the computer for any length of time without getting sharp stabbing pains in my back and neck I’m sure the video games it’ll run will be impressive.
The little bit of time I’ve spent in front of the computer has been messing around with “Dungeons and Dragons Online”… If you haven’t heard much about it or played it yet, don’t bother – it’s another ‘Turbine Entertainment’ game (the folks who foisted “Asheron’s Call” and the even more horrific “Asheron’s Call 2” upon the world a few years back) and as such it’s missing about %60 of what the average game has these days…
Too bad Turbine got bought by Microsoft and now has infinite money to suck up all the good Intellectual Property rights out there: They butchered D&D Online and the next I.P. on the block for chopping is “Middle Earth Online”. Meh, the world needs fewer 12 year olds who want to be ‘Legolas’ anyways…
Well, that about does it for the time I can sit here and type. Thank the powers of ‘back cracking’ that I was able to sit here at all for any length of time. 🙂
And with that I’ll bid you all a most excellent weekend and see you next time!