Merlot and Motrin

On Monday I made the mistake of not stretching for the thirty minutes that is recommended to someone of my age before engaging in anything as strenuous as reaching for a two-ounce hand tool.

I tweaked my back. Hard. The pain was enough to immediately drive me to my knees and onto the garage floor near the screwdriver I was trying to pick up.

I figured I had a fifty-fifty shot of making it into the house and a zero-one-hundred shot of wanting to spend the next several hours as an unmoving, mewling ball on the concrete outside until the wife finally came home. I fought through the pain enough and drug myself onto the sofa at a speed that probably made Continental Drift seem zippy in comparison.

After gently depositing myself on the sofa next to the cordless, the cell phone, and the Xbox controller I stared at the ceiling and wondered if the next four decades of my life were going to be filled with surprises like this. All I wanted to do was take advantage of a little down time (since I was home with a bug of some sort but had gotten well enough to move around) to pick up a little in the garage, and it’s not like I am out of shape – I exercise often, both cardio and weight training.

Obviously, I won’t be going to the gym for a while, which is a bummer. What is more of a bummer is that I can’t lift my son into his carseat. Luckily he is big enough to scramble up there himself but buckling or unbuckling the straps is still a hassle. Aside from that, the other heavy or physically stressful stuff is avoidable.

On the upside I learned that a recent Xbox update incorporates the Kinect’s voice commands into the streaming Netflix app. For those of you who think that last sentence was just so much gibberish that just means I can yell at my TV and have it fast forward or pause or play movies or what have you, which is nice. And about time, really. It’s 2011, after all.

I used my newfound powers of “verbal TV control” and “couch-ification” to watch a bunch of “Archer” episodes (hilarious) and I even caught “Firefly” (meh, promising) for the first time. 600mg of Motrin and 375mL of Flip Flop Merlot got me through the first night.

It’s been a few days and my back is a lot better – still not 100% but I can tell I am on the mend. I didn’t need any time off from work (I pretty much just sit in a chair all day) so as soon as the Sears AC guys finish replacing a dying motor in the unit downstairs I will head back in and complain about my back to anyone who I haven’t told yet.

And work, I suppose.