I spent a great deal of the day toiling away at improving the df.com Search widget in the left hand menu. Please feel free to give it a try. It works great. You’ll also notice that if for whatever you don’t seem to find what you’re looking for with our in in house search you can fallback to our customized Google Search. That Google based search is now conveniently found at the bottom of any in house search results page. I think that makes finding anything you may want on the site all the more accessible and insures that you can double check your search results with ease.

I’ve also added a countdown clock to the left hand menu as we continue moving towards a new digitalflood Pirate Radio episode (coming on 11/28/09). We’re about 18 days away at the time of this posting. Feel free to watch the seconds tick away in real time… or not.

Today I had my first physical therapy session. I had to fill out about 15 minutes worth of paperwork explaining what I was there for and how severe my pain was doing various tasks. The physical therapist then did a range of motion test with my arm and prescribed four more exercises to limber up my right shoulder joint. The first was shoulder shrugs, the second was rotating my upper arm in circles while in a down position, third a bicep curl, and fourth was a neck stretch. I have to do this in both forward and reverse 10 times each (except the stretch– that’s 15 seconds held on each side three times). My therapist told me the first few sessions would be to stretch and loosen the upper arm, neck, tendons, and back muscles. She will then begin slowly increasing stress on the joint with new exercises over succeeding sessions until I regained most of my range of motion. I will then be able to do the exercises on my own for another six weeks to finalize my recovery. I still also have to do the “wrecking ball” 5 minute arm hang as well, which was prescribed by my orthopedist. Each exercise session is about 15 minutes. I have to do three sessions a day everyday. One interesting thing I learned was the majority of my back pain I’ve had for the last few years can be attributed to how my shoulder has been sitting all these years.

The therapist showed me that because of the weakened muscle structure in the front of my arm I had been letting that shoulder shrug forward and compensated by keeping my elbow tucked in to hold the joint together. The result is I have been putting severe strain on my upper and lower back. I’ve also been pulling my other shoulder causing pain there as well. Again, the plan is to remedy all this over time. It was nice to figure out why I’ve had so much back pain the last few years though and that going forward there’s something I can do to remedy it.

The therapist has prescribe three PT sessions a week (about 1.5 hours per session) for the next six weeks. We’ll then take it from there. I was forewarned that the therapy will be grueling and at times painful, but that sticking with it and continuing to move is key to healing correctly.

Finally, as many of you may know my house has been plagued by two red squirrels for about the last two years. I cannot trap them. Cannot poison them. They’re pretty smart little critters. My wife won’t let me get a BB gun to shoot them (probably a good idea). Worse yet, I haven’t been able to figure out how they were getting in.

That was until yesterday morning. I noticed both of the squirrels were running out to a walnut tree by my landlord’s office building. They would then run back and disappear seemingly right under my kitchen window. I could then hear them in the wall of the kitchen. It was at that moment I realized I’d been looking on the wrong side of the house. I immediately went outside and stood back from the house. Sure enough after about 10 minutes of standing perfectly still the squirrel ran right by me and disappeared under a stone on the edge of my back patio. Three minutes later it popped back out from under the stone and ran back out to the tree.

I walked over and lifted the stone (which was on the ground flush with my house). Sure enough there was a trench dug under the stone and right to a huge hole in the back wall of my house (all which was hidden by this one patio stone). I called my landlord’s wife and supposedly he’s going to come by to look at it. In the meantime, I’m thinking of how to best seal the back wall off (my landlord tends to not be the most reliable fix it helper– I’m used to taking matters into my own hands and then billing him for it). It’s an old house and for whatever moronic reason the wall supporting the one side of the rear of the house does not have concrete poured between my back porch wall and the southern wall of the house. Even stranger– the rest of the house does have concrete poured around the foundation. So why they didn’t finish that side is probably either laziness or concerns over the both the sewer, as well as, the water main coming in through that wall about 12″ below top soil. This span is about 15′ in length and what this does is provide an easy way for rodents to dig down below ground level by about 6″ and be able to then burrow up into the field stone foundation revealing access into the rear wall. This is the little trick the squirrels use to get into my house. How they figured it out is a miracle of nature. How I’m going to seal it will be a miracle of old fashioned good old boy engineering.

I still have a one way chicken wire shoot on the hole in the eve of my house. I left it there purposely so once I did find the bottom access point and sealed it, they could then exit through that top hole (which used to be their primary entrance/exit before I sealed that) and be stuck outside. Dead squirrels in walls do not smell good even during winter.

You’ll find a picture of said squirrel in the top part of this post. It was taken back on 8/16/07. He’s peering through said chicken wire shoot, but smart enough not to come out of it.