Which I promptly did. Loading up the DVD with 5 discs of choice, settling in the recliner (which I'm becoming scarily addicted to, meaning it needs to go away soon) with my bankie and some drinks close at hand, and a favorite book or two for variety...that sums up most of my days off. My mother always used to remand my sister and I during long car trips (ok, short ones too) to look away from our books and 'rest [y]our eyes' every 15 minutes but we never did... The admonishion stayed with me, which is why I found myself doing it every 2 hours or 200 pages (as the case may be.)

This slothfulness might have something to do with the fact that I awoke this morning, for my second day back to work, with the sharp realization that my back wasn't having any more of these shenanigans, and those three ibuprofen I practically inhaled weren't going to do a damn thing to help me. This is war, and my lumbar muscles were in full offensive mode. Every breath hurts. Every twitch hurts. Every thought of movement hurts. Everything hurts. I think I understand the pain of cracked ribs now, simply because they're attached to everything I hold dear.

Namely my nerve endings. I seem to have quite a few of them.

The day started out as if scripted by a sadistic, cruel ex-boyfriend. Pain as I tried to get to the El, where the escalator might save me from jostling. Too bad BOTH escalators were down. Then, the train: dear god, does it ever stop moving? And does my body ever stop trying to compensate for said moving and just let me flop to the side and be done with it?

NO.

Then to the office, where the chair's the wrong height, the armrests are the wrong height, the desk's the wrong height, the water is too far away, and I'm starting to walk like an arthritic scoliosis sufferer. I can't even push myself around in my chair--it hurts too much to move my legs and push my torso into the chair back. ITGoE offered my Vicodin if I could wait 20 minutes, and I started counting down. Bastard didn't come thru. Luckily, the chiropractor begins at 8:30 and by 9a I was further from crying in agony. He slapped some analgesic menthol patches on my muscles and sent me on my way, and I began to appreciate the 'icy-hot' phenomenon. Wait! Am I actually *smelling* the menthol? Yay!

Did I mention I have a raging headcold on top of all this? Yeah, the new year started of with a hell of a bang. I'm a one-woman goose-calling band, complete with peckish attitude.

~~~~~

I did make it out of the recliner at irregular intervals, and during one I learned a very important lesson that I feel you need to know: Fire bad. Unexpected fire badder. Unexpected and popping fire baddest, especially when it's in your microwave.

Let me explain. When microwaving your glass votive-holder to loosen the residual wax, make sure that there's not even the slightest piece of foil-backed paper hidden in there, because those popping sounds your ancient nuker makes are not its normal attempts to heat things--no, it's the sound of FIRE, flaming inside the six walls and glaring at you through the glass. The good news, however, is that the wax comes off the glass with absolutely no problem after that.

Trust me. Heat it up a bit and it'll come right off. Just beware of metal. It's a vicious little twit.

~~~~~