"You're Only As Old As You Feel"

...and I feel like I'm about 60 years old.

Last week I wrote about my aches and pains resulting from staining our porch. Well, over the past week, they kind of dwindled away and I began feeling normal again.

Until today.

This past weekend we couldn't do work on the porch due to the freaking 10" of rain we had (no joke, it rained for like 36 hours straight), so we spent the day Saturday carousing Home Depot looking at windows, screening, and awnings for the porch, then went to Sam's Club and signed up for a membership. I'm not a big fan of the Wal-Mart corporation, in fact I avoid Wal-Mart at any cost, but we've never been in Sam's and wanted to see if a membership would benefit us. Well, it would, and we ended up getting a case of dog food and other assorted heavy items.

Yesterday we spent the day cleaning. Not the "dust and polish" type cleaning, but the "these are my organic chemistry notes from 12 years ago and why do I still have them" cleaning. Yea, the fun stuff. We're pack rats. To the degree of saving boxes from things we purchased years ago. I found empty boxes for our DVD player (bought 3 years ago), digital camera (bought 3 years ago), phones (bought 2 years ago), a CD-RW drive (bought 4 years ago) and assorted empty software boxes. While I was cleaning our spare room, Dave was cleaning in the basement, making room for a new freezer to hold all our goodies from Sam's. But apparently I hit the motherload up in the spare room. I found all of my college chemistry notebooks, study guides and papers, 10 year old newspapers, an entire box of A/V cables, and shit that had me saying, "just where the fuck did this come from, anyway?"

And our spare room is a little odd. See, the closet is not a regular closet. Imagine a regular wall with a square opening cut in the center of it. Yes, the center. The fucking closet floor is at chest-level. and it's deep. That makes it great for storage, but little else. It also sucks when I have to become Gumby to get shit out of the closet to clean it. I'm only 5'2" for chrissakes, so there's little I can reach without a ladder. So I end up getting up on the step ladder, launching myself into the closet and sitting in the tiny space I cleaned up on the closet floor so I could go through the rest of the stuff.

That damn closet was packed to the gills. After hauling a box of Dave's car magazines out of the room, I sat down to have a damn smoke. I wasn't tired or anything, just dejected at the amount of unusable shit we have. Dave came up after finishing his work in the basement, and said we should take a break and go look at freezers. Didn't have to tell me twice.

I was fairly pleased at the amount of stuff I cleared out of the closet - there's still a lot more to do, but I was ok with what I did. But today SUCKED. I didn't notice it too much this morning - mostly because I'm usually in a mental fog until I'm at work for a half-hour or so, but around 10 this morning, I got up from my desk and my lower back screamed. I had some serious pain going on. I figured I just had to walk around a little bit and it would loosen up and work its way out. No. It actually got worse as the day went on. Worse to the point where I was seriously walking like an old woman, hunched over a bit with my hand on my lower back. I have never had back pain like this. Sure I've had a sore back before - the worst was when I took a dive off an icy porch several years ago and my lower back connected with the concrete steps - but at least that watermelon-sized contusion was a valid reason for a sore back. But this is just horseshit! I can barely walk when I stand up! I'm still walking hunched over, and I've already taken 3 Alleve. I'm either going to break out the heating pad soon or tap into my Darvocet reserve (from my knee surgery a couple of years ago). I just don't get it. I know I'm not in the best shape, but there's no reason heaving some heavy stuff around should give me this much pain. Hell, I'm only 33 and I feel like I'm 60! And I bet there's some 60-year-olds who are in better shape!

And all I can think about is in 2 weeks, we're helping my parents move out of their house. Boxes, furniture, the works. I'm probably going to be immobilized after that.

Maybe I should save my Darvocet reserve for then.