Dog days of summer

August continues to be something of a let-down. I’d suggest that it outright sucks, but I worry it maybe reads this weblog and would try to get back at me out of spite.

This past Monday, I finally got things sorted out with Dell, in so far as the third time I placed my order for a new laptop I received a confirmation number and estimated delivery date. Of course, my bank decided to flag that transaction for some reason, leading to much confusion. Not on the bank’s end — I was easily able to confirm, in about a minute, that I’d made the purchase and this wasn’t fraud — but again at Dell’s. I finally called them to clarify, and the laptop has now moved out of pre-production into production proper, but it’s a little ridiculous how difficult giving them my money proved to be. I’m still getting phone calls from customer service — mostly just to follow up, tell me things the automated e-mails and Dell website have already told me — but I hope this will stop once the new computer is actually in my hands.

That, of course, won’t be for another week and a half.

This past week, I also went through two days of terrible back pain, enough to keep me from going into the office on Wednesday and Thursday. I actually think this was the worst it’s been since 2008, when my herniated disc was first diagnosed, before I had any physical therapy or spinal injections. (It’s questionable whether either of those truly helped, but either way I’d learned to cope and usually don’t feel much pain.) It hurt just to get out of bed this week, and I spent most of the day hobbling around the house, taking pain medication (just Tylenol, or the generic counterpart) and watching episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The impulse was to lie in bed, since that’s where I most free of discomfort, but I think it was a mistake. Certainly it was harder to get up afterward, and lying in bed seemed to undo any progress I’d made. I spent most of Thursday sitting upright instead, where at least I had some lumbar support, and that seems to have helped considerably. I still missed the live Rifftrax show I’d planned to attend — to say nothing of the team meeting at work where everyone made pitches for “book of the year” — but I was back to the office on Friday.

I decided to work a full day. I could have left early, thanks to summer hours, and I only would have needed to make up 90 extra minutes. (Summer hours means you work 45 minutes extra Monday through Thursday.) So I could have left at 2 or 2:30. But that would have meant working straight through to that, without any lunch. It was a quiet day — most everyone who wasn’t on summer hours was at the company’s summer outing at Great Adventure — so I didn’t mind so much.

Today my back’s doing much better, and I’m just delighted to be able to walk, bend, stand, et cetera without real pain.

Then again, this evening I watched AVP: Alien vs. Predator, so maybe there was a little pain left over for me in the week.