I went to bed last night determined to make today a fresh beginning on getting my checklists done, as well as on working on a couple of projects that I have lined up to do. I wanted so badly to make today an awesome day.

Instead, I’m sitting upright only with the help of a heating pad and lots of painkillers.

My back went out overnight somehow, and while it didn’t render me almost incapable of getting out of bed – it’s done that plenty of times in the past, before I started taking a regular NSAID for it – there is nothing that I can do today without complaint.

I can get up and move around and do things, on a very limited basis, before I’m back on the heating pad. (I’ve tried ice on my back in the past when it does this, and all the ice does is succeed in seizing it up further, not to mention making me cold, so I skip the ice nowadays.) So I plan on doing the best that I can with what I have, which isn’t much.

Take, for instance, cycling the dishwasher. In our house, this involves pulling the ceramic, glass, and metal items out first and putting them away; going back into the dishwasher for the plastics, shaking them off thoroughly in the sink, and putting then in a drying rack to finish the job; loading the dirty dishes that have piled up in the dishwasher; then finally putting away the plastics once they’ve completely dried. This morning I managed to get the very few items that fell under step one done, then had to sit and rest my back for a while. I finally asked my wife to take care of steps two and three today while I sat on the couch. Step four will happen once I’m ready to get up again; I was just recently up and am once again resting my back.

This brings me to a point that I wish to make and apologize for regarding the content you read in this blog. I don’t get out of the house much, we don’t have money for a ton of hobbies, and that means that very often I’m writing about the minutiae of my very boring day. (As Exhibit A, may I present the preceding paragraph.) I wish there were something that I could do to make this a more interesting and less monotonous read, but right now, there’s very little I can do, and I apologize for that. People read blogs to learn things or for entertainment, and this is really not a very educational or entertaining blog. It’s just me bloviating about nothing at all. It helps me to get this stuff down on paper, but I put it in blog form because I’m under the impression that people like reading what I have to say. After a year of this, I’m really starting to wonder why. I’m second guessing myself about everything, and I know it’s because I’m in pain, but I can’t help but do it and try and make it through the self-doubt.

So that’s what’s going on in my boring life today. I’ll be back tomorrow with more exciting things to share and hopefully less sarcasm about my situation.