Christopher A. Wheeler

So sometime Monday I started experiencing this back pain. It’s not uncommon for me to have this pain; its been recurring off and on for the past several years. Sometimes I go a month or so between spells, other times it may be 4 months or more. Sometimes it just lasts for a day, other times for a week. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when I am afflicted with this. I can never figure out what causes it to go away either. All I know is that it hurts like hell. A sharp pain. It doesn’t feel like a regular sore back like when you lift something wrong. It feels like a pinched nerve, or at least what I imagine what a pinched nerve would feel like.

Normally the pain isn’t too bad, I can manage quite well with just ibuprofen or tylenol. However, Tuesday morning the pain was so bad I couldn’t get out of bed. So Tuesday afternoon I went to the doctor. The doctor prescribed cyclobenzaprine, which is a muscle relaxer. The thinking is, my muscles aren’t… relaxed? Anyways, I’ve been taking these pills pretty religiously for the past few days. It doesn’t really help the pain go away, but what I have noticed, is that it makes me REALLY sleepy! Basically, other than eating, drinking, and going to the bathroom, I slept all the way from Tuesday night until Friday morning. A very long sleep. However, the pain is not going away. In fact, if anything, it is getting worse.  I don’t really know what to do about it. I’ve been taking the muscle relaxers and alternating ibuprofen/tylenol. Nothing seems to help except to sleep. But I can’t just sleep the rest of the weekend, or the rest of my life. I have too many important things to do, I think.

Anyways, why am I up at 4:30 in the morning? Well, I just got off the phone with a friend a little bit ago. I was going to write about that, but I want to think it over first, so more on that later.

Yesterday I had a chance to watch the movie Fanboys. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew the basic plot of the movie: set in 1998, some Star Wars fans decide to drive to Skywalker Ranch to steal and watch an advanced cut of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Sounds promising, but did it deliver?

I will admit, I thought it was kinda dumb, but I really liked it. I thought it was funny how they were able to work in quotes from the orignal movies. I fully appreciated the animosity between the Star Wars fans and the Trekkies… er, Trekkers. It is quite obvious from these scenes in the movie that Star Trek fans are huge geeks, while Star Wars fans are entirely cool.

Star Wars fans will appreciate cameos by Carrie Fisher and  Billy Dee Williams. Not the best movie ever made of course, but totally worth a watch if you are a fan of Star Wars.

Thumbs up.

So recently I purchased a pair of Koss KE29E Noise Isolating Earbuds from my local WalMart. I generally am not a fan of earbuds because I’ve never found a pair that fit very well; they always fall out. However, I’ve not had good luck with regular over-the-head headphones because they always get broken in my backpack. These come with three different size ear pad things to help fit any size ear.

I’m not an audiophile by any means, but to me these sound great. They fit snugly in the ear to block out a lot of the ambient noise. And I tested the fit by shaking my head all around, so much that I got dizzy, and still the earbuds were securely in place.

Like I mentioned, I got these at WalMart, and they were about $25. So far, so good.

Thumbs up.