gaspillant

Two. More. Months.

That's the summary of today's doctor's appointment. Two more months trapped in bed before I see the man again. Two more months until getting back into the chair is even up for consideration. Two more months (minimum) with these stupid tubes and holes. Two more months of living in the living room.

So much for 2012. What a year to steal from me - it's been so abnormally warm, I could have gone out for exercise in March! Instead I'm here rotting away, watching it all go by. No new place, no new job; nothing.

Nothing.

backjlinking

Hey there! You may have noticed that there's an extra link or two at the bottom of each page on my überjournal now. A few days ago, I enabled the display of "backlinks" on all the posts (past, present, an future) throughout my entire blog. What it's supposed to do is show what pages out there on the indeed-worldwide webification have linked to my posts. Of course, I don't know exactly how Google has implemented this feature, and whether/if backlink inclusion will be automatic or require extra work.

If it's automatic (hopehopehope!), hooray! Sit back, click around and enjoy the connectedness of teh interwebs as you see what crazy sites have honored me with a clickable mention.

If their backlink inclusion is manual... Bummer. We have gobs of work to do! I have little better to do these days than to vainly crawl the web in search of pages funneling readers to me, but I need your help here. If you know of or find a web page that links to me (especially if it points to a specific post), please please PLEASE head back to my site and the post that's been linked to, scroll down to "Links to this post", click "Create a link", and proudly share your discovery with all of us!

As always - and particularly emphatically this time - I request questions, comments, pro- and/or anti-backlinking commentary, and especially lectures, additions, corrections and insight on the topic at hand (especially if you can fill us in on how the Goog runs its flavor of backlinking, and what we should expect.)

Until next time... Keep up the awesome.

t4rdy

Hey there! I'm admittedly a few days late, but check it out, it's been a whopping four years since I had my stem cell self-transplant to help out with this whole spinal cord injury thing. Awesome. It's been grand. No sarcasm there, either.

Four years later, I still run across folks on occasion who try to project or implicate feelings of guilt, regret, disappointment, bitterness, etc., upon me about undergoing this procedure. I'm not running marathons or typing a million words a minute, so why did I even bother?

For these trolls brilliant chums, let's just cover one of the fundamental forces affecting my reality: gravity. Quadriplegia isn't a mosquito bite, a scraped knee, or even a broken arm. This is pretty huge. Huge, as in, on the bizarre rainbow arcing between "dead" and "alive and well," I was awfully close to the rigor mortis end. If we're going with the marathon analogy, I could barely stumble across the starting line.

That was pre-surge. After the stem cell surgery, a ton of therapy/rehabilitation, and simply the passage of time post-op, well, wow. Waaay more has improved in these four years than in those first three[ish] years pre-Portugal. Note that that's backwards: as time passes, progress is supposed to slow, such that I should have been seeing less improvement, not more. So, I may not be 110% "alive and well," but I'm much closer to that pot of gold than I would have been by now sans-op. According to our clumsy abstract marathon analogy, I can at least run the first mile thanks to surgical magic. That's not so disappointing after all.