All the News Fit to 'Print'.

It was actually a busy weekend for once. Ha ha for once!

On Friday night, after restless late-night Internet wandering, I had an epiphany about my back injuries. I remember from the original injury way back in 1991 that the doctor said I injured my Lumbar muscles. After looking around I discovered there's a muscle specifically called quadratus lumborum. This muscle attaches the hip to the 12th rib. When injured, it becomes contracted, pulling my hip up and my rib cage down. This can cause trauma all the way up to my neck, and does. All the symptoms of this injury I have or do:

-- lean to one side while sitting to accommodate
-- difficulty taking in a full deep breath, which is the result of destabilization of the diaphragm from the 12th rib being pulled down. This has been enormously irritating.
-- straightened lordosis (no curve in the back, or, flat back)
-- piriformis muscle injuries from muscle taughtness. I have this big time.
-- sciatica from piriformis compression

So, basically, I now have a way to stretch and restrengthen this muscle, thirteen years later. I wasn't given much instruction when I originally injured it. So, this is all good and will help in the long run. I hope the recovery doesn't take another 13 years.

Then, next in the news, I cashed in some American Express membership points and bought a telescope. This is a beginner's telescope and will let me see the polar ice cap on Mars, the moon in extreme detail, rings on Saturn, and moons over Jupiter. I can also see binary stars and all the other mysterious things out there. Perhaps I will discover a new planet. I will call it Friedmanopeia XLTWF87Q. Now I can join my brother in his nocturnal wanderings. Together we will watch the celestial dance and feel extremely, extremely, really very small and insignificant. After all, the Earth is just a piece of nanodust in the immensity of space.

Then, last night Dawn and I watched a really good movie: The LadyKillers. It was really good! Tom Hanks was hilariously offensive and disgusting and the movie was just plain entertaining. I think my grandmother would enjoy it (if she can handle the bad language -- but I think she can). David would enjoy it as well. Or, possibly not because I tend to like movies he doesn't and vice versa. Except the ones that matter. On those we are tight.

So, today, I am finishing homework for class (but not at work), doing Laundry (which is evil), and writing an XSL FO program to test functionality of creating high-resolution transformation on images and to test very low resolution large images scaled down to smaller so they become effectively larger resolution in an attempt to handle sizing issues. Piece of cake, right?

Off to work!