Jay Fenster

And that’s an underwhelming way to break a nearly year long silence on my own blog.

I’ll have more to say soon.

Dear California,

If you’re going to export your smoking bans to our bars, the least you could do is refrain from exporting your wildfire smoke too.

Thanks!

Love,

Jay

You already know this unless the only way that you follow my exploits is via JayFenster.com (in which case your stalking skills need work, friend), but I bought a house this spring. I live in the southwest part of the Vegas valley now in an awesome house with mountain and Strip views, pretty much as far in the middle of nowhere as you can get while still having a 15 minute commute to work.

Photos are on my Facebook.

So I’m thinking that I’d have to be nuts or unemployed to actually attempt to maintain four separate blogs when I haven’t written anything new for swina.com since like 1901.

At some point in the near future I’m probably just going to move the WordPress install I’ve got up over at more++ and start ignoring all four topics in a single centralized location.

Other than that, life goes on. After a few weeks of nervous hemming and hawing, I’ve decided I like my BlackBerry Storm. At first I didn’t know how much of my affinity for it was because it was my first BB and how much was because it was the Storm, I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter. The .75 firmware release helped with a lot of the initial beefs I (and the rest of the world) had with the device, and I’m downloading the leaked .85 release as we speak, which is supposed to be leaps and bounds better yet.

My 32nd birthday is coming up this week. I only mention it because I’ll be glad when it’s over. The period of the year between Thanksgiving and my birthday is always profoundly depressing, and this year was no exception. I’ve never been happier to see a year change on the calendar, and if it wasn’t for Barack Obama winning the election, this year would have been a total disaster.

While I despise the idea that the New Year is the only time when you can make positive change in your life, for once I’ve got in my mind a wishlist of self-improvements. For starters, I need to get serious about eliminating dairy from my diet so that I don’t end up choking to death in my sleep from lungs full of mucus. Gruesome, but that’s my misery. Once I can breathe again, I’ll think about getting back to the gym. I’m not going to be one of those January workout tourists. But if I can make time for it, I know it’d do me good on a lot of levels.

We’ll see.

So in attempting to zazz up more++, I wound up screwing up something and having no idea how to fix it, so I’m once again hitting the reset button on that project.  I wish I had enough time to actually devote to my websites and various other projects. But even with a full featured CMS at my fingertips I’m just not writing.

I wonder if it’s a similar situation to what would happen if you worked as a porn star, and didn’t want to have sex at home at the end of the night because you’d been doing it all day on the clock.

That’s clock. C… L…

I somehow managed to give myself yet another bizarre freak injury today. I was getting ready for work, putting on my clothes in the walk-in closet off my bathroom. I braced myself against the wall with my right hand as I pulled the second sock onto my left foot.

I felt as if my back was cramping up, but only for a split second – then it was like a dam bursting, lighting me up with pain like a Christmas tree, radiating from near my kidney all the way down to my knee, all the way up to my armpit and straight through my abdomen.

Now, I’ve had back issues for about a decade or so at this point, but they’ve always been pretty much confined to my upper back and environs – my neck and shoulders. I’d never had pain in my lower back before, and I’d never felt anything like this – anywhere. I knew right away that something was wrong and told Casey I needed to see a doctor – today.

I called my doctor; their response was “go to the ER.” I called my company’s health clinic, they told me to go to an urgent care center. I opted for the latter.  It was the right choice, as there was nobody in the waiting room. I was examined and x-rayed. The verdict: a pinched sciatic nerve, causing acute lower back pain and muscle spasms. Great. Even better, the doctor tells me not to expect much improvement for 3 to 4 days and advises me not to return to work until Thursday.

I’m medicated to the point of comfort right now, thankfully this didn’t happen last week or the week before. As it is, I’ve been taking care of loose ends and miscellaneous projects from home as my condition permits.

Moral of the story: never wear socks.