If you notice the awesome full moon tonight or tomorrow (technically it is full on the 28th), that's the Sturgeon Moon. I suppose Native Americans would catch sturgeon at this time of year. I don't know if they did it by moonlight, but why not? It's fun to imagine waiting for the light of the moon, pulling some kind of awesome handmade birchbark canoe out of the trees, and going fishing for your entire village. Probably more rewarding than just stopping by Panera's on the way home.

Sturgeon are the caviar fish, too. So maybe the entire village would gorge themselves on caviar? I've never been that fond of that particular flavor, I'll eat a bit, and that's enough.

But it's a great moon. Have a look.

Nobody's home.

The youngest is away at his chosen major midwestersn university, so if you go upstairs at our house there is a pronounced echo.

Bedroom 1: nada.

Bedroom 2: zilch.

Bedroom 3: wind blows across the wide savannah.

Bedroom 4: occupied by the usual clutter of crossword puzzles, clothes, books, debris of life.

Guess which one we sleep in?

It's not really that bad being empty-nested. That's what we keep telling each other. Now we can go out whenever we want!

Of course with no one else at home and no reason to "get away from it all" going out somewhere doesn't have the same urgency. We used to go away for the weekend just to get the feeling that we now have every day for free. Hmmm.

We drove to his school to drop off his stuff a week ago. His oldest brother was driving him down in a separate car because of the sudden necessity to have two bicycles on campus, and they wouldn't fit so brother volunteered to drive down first. One bike will be for getting around campus, and the other one for "serious rides." I tried to convince him that if he has good road bike on campus that he will end up using it for everything, but he says No. And I have to admit that when he makes a plan like that he usually sticks with it, so both bikes made their way to campus, one in bike rack and one in dorm room.

We followed a couple hours later the same day, feeling decidedly extraneous as we cruised into the campus area and located the local motel where we would spend the night. Why so extraneous? Well, girlfriend is attending the same MMUniversity, so who needs us around, right?

Classes start tomorrow which means there was an entire week to hang out, get to know other freshmen who did the early check-in, and get used to the campus. He also signed up for an adventure session with other freshmen. Including camping, rock climbing (real rock, not the stuff at the mall) and caving (yes, underground with the little lights on the helmets).

We drive home alone the next day. Listening to news of the trapped miners.

Well, my back is still a pain in the . . . not neck, more like the other end.

However I am getting closer and closer to my usual routine for workouts and life in general. The worst things are sitting around (like on comfy furniture) and driving long distances. Sitting at the computer isn't too bad anymore, but reading is hard unless I read at a table, like maybe the newspaper. For some reason reading books is not enjoyable while sitting at a table, but magazines and newspapers are fine. Don't know why that is.

I have an official diagnosis which is a herniated disk in the L5 position. That is the very base of the spine, L5 being the fifth (and last) lumbar vertebra. The disk showed up nicely on an MRI scan of my spine. There it was, right where it doesn't belong, pressing on the nerve that runs through that area and on into the lower body.

I have been reading up on back pain. One interesting thing is how widespread it is in our society. It is the second leading cause of missed work (after respiratory infections) and 75% of adults will experience low back pain at some time in their life. About 50% of adults have back pain in any given year, and if you use MRI scans on random members of the adult population then over 90% of subjects have problems that show up, either with abnormal curvatures, disk problems, etc. Not all of those people are experiencing any pain or discomfort from the problem, which makes diagnosis difficult for people who do have the problems.

I have not felt like writing too much. So the blog has been neglected a bit.

I am still taking Ibuprofen for the discomfort, so I can't say I am totally back to normal, but I have decided not to do much of anything about it, except increasing exercise and walking more. Back extensions seem to be the best recommendation, and walking instead of running. The other options which were injections of cortisone, or surgery, may still be in the future. But i don't like that future, so I am deciding that I am invincible and that this is just a temporary setback.

There exists a list of the 99 most desirable women on our planet.

http://www.askmen.com/specials/2007_top_99/

No, you are probably not on it, though you are free to click away and check for sure. My spouse is not on the list either, but it may be because . . . I forgot to vote? I hope she doesn't find out.

There are lots of thrilling and attractive celebrities on the list though, probably people you might expect to appear on a list like that. Halle? yep! Charlize? check! Tyra? you got it! Jessicas? yes, sir, all three of them! In fact, two of the top five are Jessicas.

But the big news is: there are now only six women on the planet that are more desirable than Shakira. I think that's pretty cool, especially for someone who started from a poor city in a poor country in a poor continent.

Everything is fine now, but one of my boys totaled his car last weekend. In a near-miracle he escaped with two scratches.

He is lucky like that. I have no idea why. When he was young he fell from a little bridge on the road by our house. It went over a small stream that had big rocks scattered around. I guess he fell about twelve feet, but landed in the water between the rocks. When I looked I saw that he landed the only way that you could land without hitting at least one rock.

The car accident started with him driving (yes, too fast, thanks for asking) Saturday morning on a dirt road in eastern Colorado. He is living out there working on a construction site, and Sat. he had to go in to work to finish something from the day before. When he was done he decided to take a shortcut on a dirt road that he had never driven before.

The road was covered with drifts of fine silt that blows around out there, and he lost control of his vehicle, a Hyundai Elantra. When the front wheels drifted off the road the car went off the shoulder and flipped. It went end-over-end and also rolled, eventually landing upside-down on the trunk. He never lost consciousness and was able to climb out the passenger door.

When he located his cell phone, which was still in the vehicle, he called home. I was in our kitchen drinking coffee when the phone rang, and I knew something was wrong when I heard his voice, but he wasn’t panicked, just out of breath. He said he had just been in an accident. And I asked When?

Just now, like two minutes ago, I just got out of the car.

He said he was all right but didn’t know what to do. He was thinking about walking to a farmhouse he could see in the distance.

I asked him if he knew which state he was in because he drives across the Colorado border to work, then I told him to hang up from me and call 911. Then call me back.

After about five minutes I called his phone back and he answered. He had called 911, but no one was on the scene yet. I could hear him talking with someone, it was another motorist who had come across the accident scene and stopped. I tried to find out the name of the motorist and where they were. I was afraid that if he collapsed I would have no idea where he was, or which state to call.

He said he felt fine, and had asked the other guy to look him over to see if there was blood anywhere or anything that looked wrong. He was having a hard time believing that he wasn’t hurt, because he was looking at the car and it was mangled so badly that it was hard to believe the driver would even be alive much less standing around chatting on his phone.

After another minute or so the other bystander’s wife arrived. He had called her, and she was in the area. They had also called the county sheriff number and she knew that the sheriff was on his way along with an ambulance.

Another motorist stopped who had seen the accident in the distance and came over to check out what had happened. (This area is pretty flat and you can see several miles in each direction.) By this time I had called my spouse who was running errands and asked her to stop at home.

When the sheriff and EMT got on scene my son ended up refusing transport, because he didn’t want an ambulance ride to the wrong town. One of the other drivers had offered to take him to the town where he lives and drop him at the medical center ER. That is just a few blocks from his apartment.

We pretty much dropped what we were doing, packed the car, and started driving to western Kansas. The most nerve-wracking event was when we lost cell phone contact and didn’t know if his battery was dead or if he had collapsed or something. We knew he was in the other guy’s vehicle heading for the ER, but they were stopping at a state recreation area to look at a boat first. The last time we spoke our son was sounding tired and withdrawn. It had been a couple of hours since the accident and he still wasn’t at the ER, though the EMT had checked him pretty thoroughly at the scene.

Well, we got him on the phone again, everything was going fine, he had just been in a dead cell area at the reservoir. That night we stopped at a motel in Nebraska after we knew that he was back home in his apartment and that the only things wrong were two scratches from broken glass and a singe on his wrist from the airbag explosion.

The next day he took some Ibuprofen and described that he was feeling like he had gone snowboarding the day before, just generally sore but not hurt anywhere. It felt good to see him and be reassured.

The next day we spent trying to figure out another vehicle so he could get to work because the area where he is, there just aren’t any other options. The good part was that he already had a couple thousand dollars saved, partly because where he lives the housing is very cheap and partly because there is nothing to spend money on after working 12-hour days.

So we were able to find him a used SUV, which is actually way better for driving around a construction site than the Hyundai he had been driving.

That car saved his life though.