Month: September 2006

Well, here I am in Culver City California!

For those who don’t know, Culver City is pretty much a back lot for MGM studios, which is about a half mile from here.

The project is a tough one, but I think I can pull it off.

More importantly, I had dinner at a real life Shakey’s Pizza! Many of you may not remember or even know about the legend that is Shakey’s…

When I was a kid a trip to the pizza parlor in Longmont Colorado was a real treat, but by the time I was a teenager and able to drive, it was gone and all of them in Colorado had shut down.

Well, it turns out there is at least one left here in California and I took Shaun, my second from work, there for dinner.

The 50 year old pizza establishment still has it – lots of stained glass and brass, and really good pizza, but the big glass Coke fountain glasses are a piece of history and are no more.

Anyways, I might have the weekend off so I’m pondering a trip over to DisneyLand – which should only cost about a hundred bucks or so…

But, right now I’m off to bed. Today started at 5am and it’s now a bit after 10pm, and I’m exhausted…

G’nite all.

Yesterday I took the plunge and bought myself one of those ‘memory foam’ beds – you know, the ones you see on TV all the time – I figure at this point I should try anything to help my back and I spend around 8 hours a day sleeping, if I can.

I also bought myself a nice leather Broyhill desk chair and a new computer desk. No more $29 Wal-Mart chair and kitchen table as I spend way too much time in front of the computer. Lets face it; cheap-ass chairs and kitchen tables are not good for the posture.

What makes this kind of ‘dumb’ is that I’ll be moving in a month or two and having to pack it all across town.

See, I’ve never been one for ‘stuff’ and until yesterday everything I own would fit nicely into my car. A big house full of crap that never gets used is really quite alien to me and I therefore try to have the very best things that I really use on a daily basis – which is the argument I used against myself to buy furniture yesterday…

The ‘memory foam’ stuff really works though – it should for what it costs. If you’ve ever spent a night in a feather bed, then you already know what this stuff is like for it is the twenty first century equivalent. It takes about a minute, maybe two, before you are encased in this mattress and immobilized for the night, and you will wake up in the exact same position you went to sleep in.

*** Begin public service announcement…

For my readers who are really into ‘extreme bed sports’, you’ll find that you will hate ‘memory foam’. This stuff was scientifically designed for sleeping on, not performing aerobics on, and therefore it absorbs ‘all’ movement and a body tends to sink about 5 inches or so into it. You would practically have to bungee you and your partner together to get anywhere on this mattress.

So should you decide to purchase said bed, you should keep the old one around for wrestling mat duty. (chuckle)

*** End public service announcement…

For me this works well as the doctor says I am to sleep on my back to help straighten out my spine, which I’ve never been able to do, as I don’t like it, and I always end up elsewhere during the night. With the new bed it makes it a conscious decision to move once the foam has ‘set’, so as I was on my back when I went to sleep I woke up staring at the numbers on the ceiling from my alarm clock.

The down side to this new bed is that getting out of it takes real work – and I don’t mean this in a figurative ‘get your ass out of bed’ way, I mean it in a literal ‘you cannot move from the form-fitting depression you’ve made in the bed’ kind of way. The mattress is also seriously thick, adding about 8 inches to the height of my old bed, which makes that first step in the morning an eye opener.

But, all in all, I woke up feeling pretty good today – my back doesn’t ‘hurt’, it’s just kind of a dull ache, and I slept a solid eight hours for the first time in what feels like months…

And that alone makes the price worth it.

Well, had another interesting night with Kaiser (my medical provider)…

One would think that being the biggest, most expensive healthcare available would allow them to have some nice, high-tech stuff. One would be wrong in that assumption though.

See, I’ve been having back problems for months now and the doctors have plum run out of symptoms to treat at this point and are finally having to try to figure it out. So I was scheduled for an MRI last night at 8:30 PM downtown.

Now, having all of my hydrogen atoms aligned in a big machine that looks and sounds like a jet engine doesn’t bug me. I’ve been into high energy physics long enough to understand quite well how the technology works and I’ve even done some research on the process from a ‘hobbyist’ perspective.

So I get to the Kaiser offices downtown at about 7:30, fill out the “have you ever even come into contact with a piece of metal” medical forms, and commence to wait an hour. Eventually I’m led back to the machine and am presented with an old GE ‘tomography’ machine from circa 1987… The technology was invented in 1983.

Anyways, so here I am looking over a piece of equipment about two steps up from the one in the Smithsonian and wondering if all the small, enclosed spaces I’ve been packed into will equate to this itty-bitty tube they plan to pack me into. The technician doesn’t seem to be concerned though – little do I know that she’s unconcerned thanks, in part, to the hydraulics that run the table that positions patients in the barrel of the ‘tomograph’.

So I remove all of the metal on my person from the waist up, which is odd because I know how powerful the fields are in these things – but again this is a 20 year old machine that might be able to generate .3 to .5 Tesla… Compared to modern equipment that can generate 2+ Tesla this thing would probably have an issue with demagnetizing my credit card.

So I lay down on the tray and the technician commences to run me into the barrel. This is where we discover that the barrel of the GE is all of about 22 inches across and my shoulders are about 27 inches across. So I contort myself, ignoring the warning twinge from my back, and she manages to pack me into the thing. I’m then told that I’ll have to hold this position for about 30 minutes.

I can only roll my eyes – because the rest of me is wedged quite nicely into this gods forsaken machine.

A few minutes pass then the banging of the MRI begins – imagine being inside a jackhammer – and then stops. The technician comes over the intercom and asks if I can straighten out any.

I laugh and answer “no”.

Shortly there after I’m extracted from the machine and told that I’ll have to be sent out to another hospital with newer equipment that has a larger barrel. Of course there is some confusion on if that will be covered under my insurance.

Oh, and I had to pay them $100 for the privilege of being crammed into their ancient machine.

So, ultimately, I wasted 2 hours of my life that I’ll never get back, caused my back pain to flare up from being crammed into the machine, and spent $100. Comparatively I guess it wasn’t all that bad because it gave me something to write about. 🙂