Normally I would be at work right now, doing tech support and database administration. Instead, I’m at home in bed, and will likely be stuck in bed for a few days on doctor’s orders. How did this happen, you might ask? Well…

A week and a half to two weeks ago, I started noticing pain in my lower back. It wasn’t TOO bad, but it was annoying to say the least. I decided on Saturday that I would call my doctor on Monday morning and see if I could get worked in to see him about the pain. Things were fine on Saturday evening, so I wasn’t too concerned. Then, Sunday, I managed to aggravate it badly after sitting in my desk chair for a couple of hours. I tried switching chairs, but that only made it worse to the point where I could do nothing more than lay in bed after 7 PM on my back, waiting for the pain to go away.

At 2:30 AM, I woke up, and could move around. So, I decided to sit up…

… and fell back down with a scream of pain loud enough to wake my parents.

From that point, my back started twitching and spasming, with each spasm being bad enough where I got to the point where I was gasping for breath and begging for an ambulance. An ambulance was finally sent for, and I got sent down to Houston Northwest Medical Center’s emergency room.

The prognosis from the ER doctor is that I badly sprained my lumbar muscles. He’s prescribed me a painkiller and a muscle relaxant, and has ordered me to stay in bed for the next few days to let it heal. I’m okay with that for now; I can access the company network remotely from my work laptop and also have access to my main PC via RDP. My main gripe is that I’m hoping I don’t miss Meredith’s and Jonathan’s New Year’s Eve party for the second year in a row. Ah, well… we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m just going to relax, take my meds, and hope I actually do get better, as this pain is really for the birds. Here’s hoping… :-)

Well, I’m not one to obsessively say “Merry Christmas”, “Happy Hanukkah”, “Blessed Winter Solstice”, and the like… but I’m hoping everyone has a very good holiday season of his or her own choosing. That said, I figured I’d post this holiday video card I saw on Kotaku. I’m sure about the only ones who’d be amused by it are Becky, Brian, and Jesse, but it’s cute nonetheless. :-)

I admit to playing a prank on coworkers today.

On my way to Festivus Friday night, I stopped by Spec’s and picked up a bottle of strawberry margarita and a canister of a particular snack food. I had plenty of the snack food left when I left the party, so I brought it home with me. When I left for work this morning, I brought the canister with me. During the day, I walked around the office munching out of the canister, with my hand strategically placed over the name of the snack. If someone were to ask me what I was eating, I’d hold the canister out and offer them some. They’d then try it…

… and in over half the people, they’d chew on it for a second, and then their faces would turn into a look of pure horror. One or two of them even spit it out. I just love watching the look on people’s faces when they have wasabi peas for the first time. :-)

I think the funniest encounter I had was with the CEO’s secretary. She tried a few peas, munched on them; her eyes grew wide and she quickly swallowed them. At that moment, the CEO walked in, saw the canister in my hand, and before I could even THINK of saying anything (not that I’d be so stupid as to try that trick on him), he smiled and said, “Ahh… wasabi peas. I love them; I always keep a canister in my pantry.”

Ah, well. It made for a fun and amusing day. :-)

Yes, Festivus was a lot of fun. I’ll probably make a post about it a bit later, but first I wanted to make an observation…

As is well known, back in March or so I made it my goal to change my eating and exercise habits, and lose weight as a result. I had noticed some changes (especially in terms of pants sizes), but more often than not I would hear from friends and colleagues about how much weight I had been losing. When I look at myself in the mirror, it’s kind of hard to tell. Well, late last night or early this morning, Ray posted some pictures from last night’s Festivus, and I was floored by how I looked. I’ll give you a bit of a comparison.

I had no idea I had lost so much weight. In all modesty, I think I look good… heh.

I’m kind of falling off the wagon this month thanks to Christmas et al, but I plan on getting back on the wagon once the New Year rolls around. I’m not eating like I was, mind, but I’ve been in more splurge situations than before. I hope to get closer to my target weight by February, but for now I’m just happy that my efforts are obviously paying off. :-)

In about two hours, I’ll be over at McCormick Manor (aka, Sean’s father’s house) for Sean’s annual Festivus party. Seeing as there are people who want to attend but won’t be able to, Sean and I have worked together to make a live feed of the event. In addition, Sean Loyless is making a live feed of his Festivus party as well, and we’ll have it set up where we’ll be seeing each other live. If you want to take part as well, just fire up Skype and add “VirtualFestivus” as a contact. You’ll be conferenced in as well!

McCormick Manor live feed:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/red-cedar-place—-festivus-2008
San Antonio live feed:
http://www.dailyhaggis.com/festivus

We’ll start broadcasting from McCormick Manor sometime between 7 and 8 PM CST. Consider this your chance to see me live and not in a set video like an interview. :-) If I don’t hear from you, have a happy Festivus, everyone!

In my last post, I reposted a meme requesting information from my readers (more from the LiveJournal side). Well, on the post’s LiveJournal mirror, Jesse decided to ask me to post the entire history of Mortal Kombat in less than thirty sentences (400 words). I asked her to clarify; did she want the in-game history or the actual history of the game series? Her response:

“Actual history, and I WANT IT IN HAIKU FORMAT. WITH NAMES AND DATES.”

I decided to take her up on the challenge, and less than thirty minutes later had it done. Seeing as at least one friend really liked it, I’ve decided to make it available here for others to read. :-)
Read more “The Haiku History of Mortal Kombat.”

Well, the past month hasn’t been too kind to me, diet-wise. I’ve been fluctuating between 214 pounds and 219 pounds, thanks to not being good with what I was eating, extra splurge meals thanks to birthdays, and the whole Thanksgiving deal. Now that Thanksgiving is over, I can go ahead and concentrate on losing weight again. Granted, Christmas is coming up, but it really shouldn’t be too bad, and quite frankly with no real events happening this month other than that I shouldn’t have any real problems. We’ll see how it goes, though.

The thing I’m finding pretty funny right now, though, is the fact that if you had told me five or six years ago that Asian food would be a major part of my diet, I would have laughed in your face. However, that seems to have precisely happened. More often than not, I end up having pho or vermicelli for lunch at this place called Pho Saigon, which has locations right by my office and by our Creekmont location. About once a week or so I get Chinese takeout at a place right outside my subdivision called Hunam Garden, which is EXTREMELY convenient for me to pick up from on my way home from work. Also, once every week or two, I have sushi either at a sushi place or I pick some up from Kroger’s. It’s surprised me how much I enjoy it, especially considering how apathetic I was to it in the past. The main challenge I face now is getting Misty to try it, especially the Vietnamese stuff. Ah, well… maybe I can start her off slowly, like on sandwiches. :-)

Actually, on a side note, most of us in IT where I work are waiting for the boss to notice a bit of rebellion we’ve fostered. The boss goes to this Vietnamese noodle place called Steve’s for lunch, which is about a block or two from the office. He’s taken us there a couple of times, but the rest of us truly dislike it and prefer going to Pho Saigon. The boss, on the other hand, prefers going to Steve’s. We have no idea why, as one coworker ended up with roaches in his drink on more than one occasion, and another coworker waited an hour for her food (and when she got up to leave they insisted they were getting it ready, yet she could see in the kitchen and there was no one doing anything). Not only that, Pho Saigon has better food, bigger portions, lower prices, better service, and is much faster. To each his own… but we’re now waiting to see how long it is before the boss notices that every single person in the IT office now has a Pho Saigon calendar hanging by his or her desk. :-)

Ah, well. The nice thing about having a small bowl of pho or vermicelli for lunch is the fact that I’m hungry by 4 PM, which tells me that I’m eating less than before. As long as I keep this up, I might even hit the 195-200 pound goal by the time the parents and I go to Vegas (which is another post in and of itself). We’ll see how it goes… wish me luck. :-)

Well, I have to say it’s been a very interesting week. From dealing with my own birthday last Sunday to going to Jinny’s birthday party yesterday, I must say that I’ve had plenty of things to do this week. It all started with my birthday last Sunday. All in all, it was a quiet day. When I got up, I found that Mom and Dad had bought me Tom Clancy’s EndWar and LEGO Batman for my Xbox 360. Mom had also bought me seasons 1-3 of Doctor Who, but Amazon had yet to send them. That evening, the folks took me to PF Chang’s for dinner, which was excellent as always. Otherwise, I had a nice and quiet birthday.

Tuesday was the big day, because that was the day we did the Fight Night event for Mortal Kombat Online. I arrived in Chicago close to noon, and quickly made my way to the L station at O’Hare so that I could meet up with Crow. Once Crow and I got on the L, we made our way to the hotel, with a couple of wrong turns along the way. We also stopped for lunch; we ended up eating at Cheesecake Factory, which he had never been to before. Once done there, we made our way to the hotel, where we started to work on picking questions for the event. When 5 PM rolled around, we got a taxi and made our way to Midway.

The event itself was fun. Fortunately I had planned ahead of time and set up portable versions of X-Chat onto a USB drive customized for each attendee, and simply needed to copy the folders to the desktops of the attendees’ machines. While I coordinated the questions and answers, Crow sat with Jeff with Midway and picked questions. I was also happy in that I finally got to meet one MK team “bigwig” who I had never met before, and that was Carlos Pesina (an artist, who actually played Raiden in Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II. and Mortal Kombat Trilogy). If you’d like to see how the event turned out, well, a transcript is available here. I personally thought it went well, even though this was the first Fight Night we had done where the event took place before the game’s release. Once the event was done, we caught a cab back to our hotel, where we put our stuff away, and then walked a few blocks away to find a bar and have a couple of drinks to wind down. That done, we went back to the hotel and turned in for the night.

The next day, after grabbing some breakfast and checking the channel for the post-chat reaction, we ended up making our way to O’Hare. After going through security (and Crow realizing his normal pants had too many studs, causing him to be wanded down), we found a Chili’s to have lunch at. Once we ate at Chili’s, we went to Crow’s gate, and waited for his flight. And waited. And waited. His flight ended up leaving an hour late, but I ended up utilizing the time to upload videos to YouTube for MK Online news stories. After Crow had left, I went to my gate and waited for my flight. From there things were uneventful, other than the overhead bin not having room for my backpack, leaving me stuck with little legroom and making me very uncomfortable.

Otherwise, the big event for us was Jinny’s birthday party. Jinny decided that she wanted to feel more like 5 or 15 than 35, so we planned appropriately. We all met at the McDonald’s at Kuykendahl and Louetta for dinner. Once we were done there, we went to Dean’s (Sean’s father) house for drinks and cake. Once we all had a drink and some cake, it was time to go to the roller skating rink.

Yes, you read that right. We went to the local roller skating rink.

The manager didn’t know quite to make of our group of ten people in our mid-30’s who had come to skate, but we just told him we were reliving our childhoods. :-) Oh, man, it was a BLAST. Some of us took a while to get the hang of it, but after a few unsteady minutes I was back into the swing of things. Granted, I also had more wipeouts than anyone else. But still, we had a LOT of fun, even if some of us were complaining about how out of shape we were and how much it was causing legs and hips to hurt. We stayed until the place closed down, at which point most of us went back to Dean’s for more drinks. We stayed there, sat around, and BSed and had drinks for a couple of hours, until one point where Jinny said, “You know what? I want hash browns.”

So, it was off to Denny’s we went.

We were there for about an hour and a half, still talking, having coffee, and eating. We ended up breaking up around 3 AM, which was fortunate for me because I was nearing a crash point. I drove home, quickly brushed my teeth, and fell into bed without even bothering to change my IM status or check messages.

As for today, it’s been relatively quiet. This week probably won’t be eventful; I have an optometrist appointment on Tuesday, and I THINK Jesse is coming into town this week, but at the rate things are going I doubt I’ll get to see her or Rob. Ah, well. I also need to pick up a copy of Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe and get cracking on that. For now, though, I’m just going to go to bed and catch up on rest. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.