I don’t know why, but for about the last 20 hours, I’ve been really nauseous. I have a Seinfeldian non-vomit streak going (last time was when I was 10 and had food poisoning from bad shrimp), but I don’t know how much longer it will last.

I have stayed home from work in an effort not to puke on my coworkers. I may get a chance to change things up and puke on the cat instead of having him puke on me.

Good times.

They painted the outside of my building in early January, and they took the numbers off the doors when they painted.

I’ve been without numbers for a couple weeks now, which was fun when I tried to order in and had to explain to order-takers where in my building my apartment is, only to have them repeatedly fail to relay this information to the drivers actually delivering my food.

I was happy to see numbers back on my building when I returned home Friday night, but something was a bit off when I got to my apartment:

I wasn’t alone. Almost everyone else with a 1 in their apartment number ended up with the same black one with their silver last number. Well, Apartment 11 just got two black ones, and then the folks next door to me got off easiest:

At least to the unobservant or colorblind, theirs look normal. Mine look like the numbers on a cheap motel in a bad horror movie.

They’re a sign that you should yell at the screen, admonishing the idiot characters not to enter, because there’s totally a guy with a hook inside waiting to disembowel them.

It all started when a coworker came up to me tuesday and said, “You’re big into tech stuff, right?” Always dangerous words, but I had no idea how dangerous they would prove this time.

And so it was that he told me of the absolutely absurd deal he got on a really, really nice Panasonic HDTV from a liquidator in Silicon Valley, hired to dispose of some late-2006 model plasmas with little to no wear and tear at low low prices.

How low? Less than half of what the 42″, really high quality plasmas were going for new. Enough that instead of simply getting the television I could afford, I got the entire A/V setup I wanted for the money I’d saved up.

After some hemming and hawing (and coming thisclose to convincing Nate and Liz to be as stupid as I am), I went for the deal. Because it was going to be super-expensive to ship, I convinced Nate to come with me to Menlo Park to pick it up today.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Gigantic Damn Television:

Now since Nate and I are both huge geeks, we looked at the map and realized we were going to only be a few miles from Cupertino. Since we were running a good bit early, we decided to make a quick stop:

And to take our nerdiness officially over the top:

When I asked one Charlie Chaplin the Cat what he thought of this entire endeavor, he pulled this face, which I’ll bet more than a couple of you are pulling right now:

Special thanks to Nate, who not only accompanied me and had the intestinal fortitude to resist purchasing one on the spot (which I surely could not have done), but who helped my half-cripped ass lug the damn thing up to my apartment.

Nate, without you, I couldn’t watch spectacularly awful television in truly spectacular HD.

More TK when I get the HD TiVo (oh you better believe it) and everything else up and running.

Bone Bruise!

This is basically an intermediate scenario of the two I thought I’d be dealing with. Not as nearly as bad as pain without an obvious cause, but not as good as pain that can immediately be fixed with arthroscopic surgery.

Unfortunately, the main treatment for a bone bruise is time, and the recovery period is really nebulous: “Days to months” is the time frame I’ve seen quoted repeatedly online.

The orthopedist mentioned that if I’m still in a lot of pain in a couple of weeks, he’d consider giving me a cortisone injection. However, the bruise is close enough to a major tendon that reacts poorly to cortisone that he’d have to put me in a cast to prevent the cortisone from leaking into the vicinity of the tendon.

I don’t care how much it hurts, I am NOT going to be doing that.

Instead, I have to try and rest it as much as possible (real easy when my job involves running around like a crazy person a good deal of the time) and continue taking the handfuls of Advil I’ve been eating for the last week.

The orthopedist also sentenced me to another month in Physical Therapy in order to try and accelerate the healing process.

Oh goody, more getting up at 6am! I didn’t enjoy it nearly enough the first time.

At least I know what I’m dealing with now. I’m frustrated as hell that there’s no timeline for when this should actually start feeling better, but I’ll take knowing what the problem is as a consolation prize.

Mark and I are both obsessed with 24.

Mark lives in Chicago. I live in Los Angeles, and despite actually working on the Fox Lot, do not have access to the east coast feed of 24.

This results in text message exchanges like the following text messages, which were exchanged between 6:34pm and 7:04pm yesterday:

6:34pm
Mark: Holy shit. 24. Holy Shit. U will shit your load. [uh...what?]

6:38pm
Ellen: Damn you. It’s not on for another 3 hours here!

6:38pm
Mark: Holy Fuck!

6:42pm
Mark: this is incredible.

6:44pm
Ellen: It’s just going to be Jack driving to Pasadena for an hour, isn’t it?

6:44pm
Mark: No, it starts with jack going door to door saving america. But then. holy shit.

7:03pm
Ellen: Damn you, how many times must I tell you, TELL ME NOTHING!!!

6:55pm [arrived 7:04pm]
Mark: aaagh! Awesome!

7:05pm
Mark: You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

Having now watched the episode, I can say Mark is absolutely right. I would never, ever have believed him. And yet I believed every second of the show when I watched it.

Sweet lord, this show is awesome.

The MRI of DOOOOOOOOM! will be taking place tomorrow morning at 8am.

Apparently my insurance company is too cheap to cover an open MRI, so I get the good old Giant Tube of Craptacularness. Always fun for the borderline claustrophobe.

In the end, all I want is a damn answer as to why my ankle hurts like a motherfucker. Preferably a fixable answer, but I’ll settle for an answer.

Please cross your fingers that I am not, technically, DOOOOOOOOOMED.

Still no MRI of DOOOOOOOM yet, apparently the delightful folks at Blue Cross thought I could do with a weekend of sitting in my apartment and watching Rear Window.

I had to take the trash out today, and when taking the trash out and getting the mail leaves you whimpering in pain, you know something’s fairly seriously wrong.

Also, I went to put on a pair of jeans I bought recently today and experienced everyone’s favorite delightfully distressing “they won’t zip!” moment.

Actually, not even just that. It was more, “They won’t zip and simply having them buttoned is crushing my kidneys!”

This despite being purchased at the same time as another pair of pants of the same style and size, which I wore Friday with absolutely no problem.

I double-checked the size on the tag sewn into the pants, and it claims they’re my size. I had a lot of Chinese food last night, but I don’t think I had that much.

Damn you Old Navy, and Damn you to Hell, Mr. Cranky Ankle!

Well, the need for the MRI of DOOOOOOOOOM is official.

Went to the doctor this morning, and there are basically two main possibilities about why my ankle has severely regressed in the last four days:

POSSIBILITY “BAD.” The ankle is inflamed because pieces of bone have broken off from the location of my avulsion fracture and are irritating the tissue. If this is the case, I have to have arthroscopic surgery to remove the pieces. However, once the pieces are removed, the swelling should go down and I should be fine.

POSSIBILITY “WORSE.” The ankle is inflamed for no particular reason, I have to do several more months of rehab, and there’s a strong possibility this will turn into an unpredictable and chronic issue with no cure other than repeated stints rehabbing whenever it flares up.

I didn’t think I’d ever be in a position where I had to say this, but man, I really hope I need surgery.

- There is nothing that will wake a cat owner faster from a dead sleep at 4am than the sound of a cat, even halfway across the house, about to puke.

- When it’s this cold in LA (37 degrees when I left the house yesterday), does that mean hell’s officially frozen over?

- Working on a TV show where every single MRI we show goes bad (to the point where TWoP has nicknamed it “The MRI of DOOOOOOOOOOOM”) makes you more than a little reluctant to schedule medical appointments, even necessary ones, that might result in having to get an MRI.

I will not say anything specific so as not to spoil it for those who are time-shifting it but…Sweet Holy Crap On A Stick, the last 10 minutes?

The one thing I thought was the big end-of-episode turning point and then they turn around and pull THAT shit?! God DAMN, I love this show.