Visit to the chiropractor

I had my first visit to the chiropractor yesterday for the lower back pain I've experienced since March 8, the day after a P90X back workout. I've never visited a chiropractor before. The pain was very specific, located in a three inch spot on the right of the lower back. It would give me a stab of pain at a certain point of my stride, every time I walked. She asked questions and did some simple tests. I had brought in the worksheet from that workout so that she could see exactly what exercises I did, and she pointed out one exercise that sometimes causes problems like this: she suspected it was the right sacroiliac (SI) joint. It's supposed to flex when you walk, but sometimes it gets stuck, due to a wrench (as in this case, from weight lifting). She said she's seen people come in with injuries like this from P90X.

So she ran electrodes through the muscles in my back for a few minutes to relax them. Then, she had me lie on my side, hoicked up my knee, had me wrap my arms around my shoulders and turned me so that my spine was twisted. She leaned down and pushed and--CRACK! I yelped, but not so much in hurt as in surprise at the click I felt deep within myself. Wow.

I got up, and ran through the tests again. I still felt some pain bending over, but less. And the pain when I walked is all but gone. There are some vague aches today, but nothing like the stabbing I felt before.

I'm to go back for a follow up on Monday, and I'm to hold off attempting to exercise at all until after then. But I'm very hopeful that this will quickly have me on the mend. Amazing.

Caine's Arcade

This is a GREAT story. Watch this: it'll be the best ten minutes you'll spend today.

A 9-year-old boy spent the summer building a cardboard arcade in his dad’s small auto parts store in East L.A.

His first and only customer, who happened to be a filmmaker, decided to bring some more people to play.

9 year old Caine Monroy is about to have the best day of his life.

Oh, and by the way – if you go to the Caine’s Arcade site they put together, you’ll see that people have chipped in over $137,000+ for him to go to college. There's also a Facebook page.

This decreased worksuck in a major way. Kudos to the loving dad. George Monroy, who found a way to foster his son's creativity while running his business. Here's an interview done by the local NBC affiliate, which includes a short interview with the dad, and it's hilarious: "We're in a junkyard and this is the front office. So he started taking up half the office. And then he had three-quarters of the office, and I just kept moving over and over as he kept building. He kept using bigger boxes. Then he tried to make a ticket thing with a leaf blower. He made me go buy a leaf blower so he could blow tickets around inside the box. So we bought a leaf blower, we plugged it in and tickets were flying everywhere."

Kudos also to filmaker Nirvan Mullick, who took the trouble to NOTICE.

A short film by Nirvan, produced by Interconnected.