Calamity

Not my actual back, but this is my blog and I can pretend.

Nothing major happened the last two weeks since I wrote that monster blog entry and promised myself that I would write much shorter entries more often.

A few personal heroes died: Roger Ebert and Jonathan Winters. At home, lots of little horrible things happened that kind of destabilized things around here.

The most significant was something I mentioned last time; our girls got a stomach bug. What I didn’t know at the time was that it would take a few days longer for them to fully recover and that the whole week after Easter was going to be a lot of changing work shifts and hoping that neither kid threw up at school and got send home. (That happened twice.) Luckily, my wife and I both fought off whatever the bug was, although we each had a dicey day where we thought we were getting it.

Then my mother got it, much worse than the kids. Then my father in law got it. Then other members of the family reported other ailments. And this is right after I’d just been knocked on my ass for a full day with horrible allergies.

Things were starting to go back to normal as the kids got over their bi-directional expulsion of bodily fluids and then suddenly I started getting a weird pain in my back.

It wasn’t suddenly in one way: I began to feel some back issues right after South by Southwest and I thought a massage I got soon after had fixed most of it. But this one specific spot on my back kept getting worse and worse until finally it got to where I couldn’t stand for too long without a sharp pain mid-back, just to the right of my spine. It hurt to sit, it hurt to stand, it hurt even to lie down sometimes.

Maybe it was from lugging a heavy laptop bag around during the festival or maybe I just pulled something at the gym. I had no idea what was up and it kept getting worse. So I saw a doctor.

I don’t have a primary down here in New Braunfels, so I went through my insurance and just picked one at random. It turned out to be in a really nice house-like building that specialized in back pain, allergies and, I guess massage therapy.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but the conclusion was this: they thought it was a muscle spasm and they injected a needle full of saline right the fuck in the muscle that was giving me problems. They warned me it would hurt and boy were they not lying. I stifled a scream as I stood there with a needle in me and my muscle spasming worse than ever.

It started to feel better immediately and they prescribed me some anti-inflammatory meds and some serious muscle relaxer medicine that I can only take at night before I go to bed. That stuff knocked me out two days in a row and is not to be trifled with.

The back feels a lot better but that spot of pain still comes and goes a little. I really don’t know how people who live with chronic pain do it. It’s at the point where all I want is to feel normal again and not have to worry about a physical problem getting worse and taking me out of commission. It seems like small potatoes given the health issues others have to deal with, but all this has been happening right around my 38th birthday and I am very aware that I’m at the stage where shit’s going to start breaking down, some of it irrevocably, and I should stop expecting my body to just stay the way it is forever without problems. There’s certainly more to come.

As sometimes happens with this blog, I wrote the above and left it unpublished, planning to go back in the next day and add images and links to flesh it out.

That was Sunday night. On Monday, Boston was bombed.

I didn’t feel at all like going in and looking over what I wrote about back pain and a stomach bug and publishing it that night.

Apart from something so significant making all of our problems look so much smaller, it just felt all too familiar to me and the gut-punch to the stomach never really goes away. Not after they figure out what happened, not after they find the person or people who did it, not after the punishment is dealt.

Some new writing stuff: last week, my Digital Savant column was a sampling of reader emails about a column I did on technology gripes. The reader responses were so good, I rolled them together into a piece and gave my own feedback to their problems.

Clay Shortall shows off some of the 3-D printing tools of his trade. Photo by Christina Burke, Austin American-Statesman

This week’s column is about the future of 3-D printing and how quickly we may see it go mainstream. I think this is something that’s going to evolve really quickly and get into our homes a lot sooner than you might expect. Not everyone will need one that soon and it’s going to take a much easier learning curve, but I think it won’t be long before some version of 3-D printing becomes very, very popular and widespread.

The last two Micro features were about Wi-Fi calling and Bitcoins.

I had a few other things to say about Bitcoin on Twitter.

Do you crave constant volatility but don’t have a crazy enough boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife to generate the drama? #Bitcoin!

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) April 10, 2013

New career idea: me, wearing a tophat, monocle and tux with tails, raising VC for my new persona/startup, BARON VON BITCOIN!

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) April 12, 2013

I also had my first front-page story in a while, a Q&A on Google Fiber coming to Austin. (It was paired with the main Statesman news story, which you can find here.) There were rumors about it starting the Friday before the announcement and it snowballed into a pretty sizable national story by the time the official announcement happened. I was there and it felt a lot like a pep rally only instead of your football coach and principal, it was the mayor, the governor and a bunch of Google people telling us how lucky Austin is to be getting such a cool thing. We shall see how long it takes; if there’s one thing Austinites like to do is complain about things that don’t meet their expectations.

And one other story I did was about Austin’s Rooster Teeth, who are going independent and closing in on 2 billion (yes BILLION) views on YouTube. There’s also a separate blog post with some more background info on their 10th anniversary.

Our Space Monkeys addressed the situation in North Korea and dealt with breakfast cereal mascots.

For my 38th(!) birthday, we kept it pretty low-key. We went to San Antonio for lunch, I saw a movie (The Evil Dead; it was fine, not great) with my brother and played “Zombicide” that night, which was lots of fun.

Took the girls to the Children’s Museum this last weekend and they painted these for you:

Artists vine.co/v/bFZwKMwium0

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) April 13, 2013