[This post is entirely off topic. If you're looking for naming expertise or commentary you'll want to pass this post up.]

A few of you have sent me emails asking why I didn't post yesterday (and one of you accused me of not posting today either... ha!) I'm sorry that your daily fix of name-related blather was missing.

I have what I believe to be a good excuse - I was incapacitated.

No... really.

At about 11 PM on Monday night I walked into my room (after three days of priming and painting our basement) and felt a painful twinge in my lower back. Thinking this odd I adjusted my posture to make it stop. What followed was described by my wife as me doing a 30 second impression of a folding chair being taken down.

I might add that I was none too silent while my act was going on. I don't have a clue what I said, but I know it was loud. It ended with me completely flattened out on my chest.

Have any of you ever had such horrible pain that you can't do anything but laugh? That was me. Lying on the floor completely unable to tense any muscle in my body - but oddly able to emote the exactly wrong thing.

Over the last 48 hours I have gone from not being able to move at all, to having to make my pregnant wife lift my various bodyparts to get under the covers of our bed, to literally dragging myself into the bathroom, to crawling and then stumbling. Today I feel like I'm almost human again, though I'm carrying around a few of those freezer-ice packs that some vendor sent me when I ordered cheese online.

Incidentally, ordering cheese online is not something I would recommend. Especially the variety pack. No human being should ever have to eat hard cheese with lemon rind in it.

So those ice packs make for interesting conversational interludes, though. If there's ever a lull in conversation I now know I can just whip one out and place it gingerly above my butt. It doesn't matter how quietly or stealthily I do this - everyone in the room will notice. People in the room will begin to take bets on whether or not I have hemorrhoids. I then must jump in to explain the situation, wave around the ice a bit, show people that, yes - the little wet spot from the ice is on my back not my bottom, and tell them that no - I will not do anything further to prove that I do not, in fact, have hemorrhoids (wagers be damned.)

This is followed by a ten minute interlude of everyone exchanging back injury stories and maybe a couple women expressing their concern for my pregnant wife who apparently is going to be experiencing some issues in one or both of the two body-areas mentioned in the previous paragraph as part of the whole miracle of life thing she's got going on.

Anyhow - all of this leads me to the writing of this post. If, during the next few days you ask me why I am carrying around a little bag of freezer-ice (as if there is any other kind that I might have access to...) I will shortcut all of the awkward (for me) discussion by saying the following -

I wrote about it on my blog. (A conversation killer if there ever was one.)

...or maybe I should just print this out with a space for pity-comments and atta-boy's at the end.

Either way, I hereby retire from my promising ceiling-painting avocation. At least until I find spots that I missed in the first three passes.

Tate Linden Principal Consultant Stokefire Consulting Group 703-778-9925