This week marks a bit of a milestone for us, as the boy started at day care on Monday. For all of the concern about how he'd react to being in unfamiliar territory with people he doesn't know - most of them other, somewhat larger, kids - he did fine. No crying, no fussing, slept and ate fine. We should have expected that, as he's never put up a fuss when interacting with any of our family and friends, and will pretty much take a bottle from whoever is holding it.

Us parents, though, didn't do as well. The wife actually did very well in the morning, keeping the drop off quick so the emotions wouldn't build up. It helped that many of her co-workers are moms themselves, and those that aren't are certainly sympathetic.

Come the afternoon, though, plans fell awry. After dropping off the boy, the wife takes a bus from the Wonderland stop to her office, and does the trip in reverse after work. Going in, the bus went by the stop a few minutes early, so the wife had to wait for the next one. Not that big a deal, she got to work less early that she would have otherwise.

The problem came when the bus didn't show in the afternoon. This is apparently very rare, and the wife's fellow riders gave the driver an earful when the next bus came along. But by this time, it was clear that the wife was going to be late. So she called me.

I, as luck would have it, was at North Station having just missed a train. I'd have made it except the other train sharing the platform started boarding, and I couldn't fight through the swarm of passengers to get to my train. In any event, it gave me a chance to take her panicked call and plan on taking the Blue Line out to Wonderland, with the first one of us to get there to pick up the boy and then drive to the station to get the other person.

Turns out I was the first one there, so I hoofed over and got the boy. He was sleeping in his car seat ready to go, thankfully only 15 minutes later than planned (the day care provider was very understanding, I suppose she's used to this sort of thing at the start). The only snag after that was the parking ticket we got - the parking in that neighborhood is apparently resident only (which, given its proximity to Wonderland, makes sense in retrospect).

It probably shouldn't be a surprise that the transition to day care is harder on us than it is on the boy, but there it is. I'm just happy we don't have to go through this every day.

There are things we take for granted that are simple yet serve and important function. Witness the aglet, the plastic or metal cap at the ends of a shoelace. It has no intrinsic value, but if you ever lose one, it makes it next to impossible to relace the shoe. On the other end of things, we have things that are, in some fashion, so complex that it's easier not to think of them, like the electrical grid or gravity.

In between these points, we have the human back. Muscle, bone, nerves and connective tissue, all critically important to a variety of processes. Walking, standing, sitting, lifting, turning, there's not much by way of human movement that doesn't, at some stage, involve the back. But, like aglets or gravity, it's something we tend to take for granted.

Usually.

I stopped taking it for granted last weekend, when my lower back decided to remind me just who was in charge. I have no idea what caused the problem (the wife thinks it was an awkward movement while separating car seat and stroller, which sounds about right), but the results were not long in coming:

Friday afternoon: Felt a twinge, took two Aleve. In past moments of back and hip discomfort, this usually takes care of things.

Friday night: Twinge is still there, maybe even a little worse. Took another Aleve, put a couple pillows behind me for support when sitting, but no other changes.

Saturday morning: Getting out of bed requires a variety of hand holds on any furniture within arm's length. I can walk - barely - with a fair amount of pain and over short distances, using the wall for support. When upright, I can feel the muscles in my lower back seize up, which is a new experience for me.

We try a heat pad to loosen things up, but it doesn't work. So it's off to spend our Saturday morning at the hospital. But when we get there, we discover that they're running some sort of disaster drill. We're stopped as we turn into the road that leads to the hospital, and asked if we're there for the drill or actual care. We reply the latter, and are given a green tag for the dashboard. This allows us to get by the next two checkpoints, but we do have to weave through a variety of first responders, volunteers and emergency vehicles to actually get to the Emergency drop-off.

Which, of course, is manned by someone who is also checking to see if people are there for the drill or for treatment. The guy asks me to stop at the door, but before he can say anything else a woman comes by and he leaves with her. I think he intended that I'd wait for him to return. I did not. He actually followed me into the ER when he was done with the woman, so if nothing else if we do have a disaster up here, we certainly have the right people to handle traffic flow, if nothing else.

Saturday morning is thr right time to go to the Beverly Hospital ER, as our entire visit was no longer than 90 minutes. It wasn't especially crowded; there was one mother with two kids who spent more time on her cell phone than minding her kids, one of whom apparently needed some sort of medication, and a woman who I know but haven't seen in some time, who chatted with the wife while I was being seen.

(The wife gets this semi-regularly, running into people she doesn't really know but who know me and know that we're married. Though in this case I don't know why the woman just didn't say hi while I was out there.)

Anyway, I get called and spend the next 20 minutes sitting in a room wearing shorts and a johnnie (I think we can all be thankful that they let me keep my shorts on). In this time, the woman with the kids winds up down the hall, and in the 20 minutes I was waiting they managed to get the nurse manager to come in and cause a panic when one of the kids yanked the emergency call switch in the room. Things quieted down after that; I assume the hospital had someone babysit the room from that point.

Once the doctor showed up, he spent about five minutes checking breathing, heart beat and leg movement before deciding it was a muscle problem and not an issue with discs or the like. I got various scrips and was sent packing.

And by that afternoon, I felt pretty good, well enough to hang out downstairs as if nothing happened. Which worked well, for a while. But it wasn't too long before things locked up again, at which point I put myself to bed... for nearly three days. This is the longest period I've ever spent laid up like that, and I don't recommend it. As bad as it was for me, I was also mad that I'd put the wife in a position where she had to do all the work with the baby and take care of me. I tried to minimize the amount of time she needed with me, but it was still hard on her, and I'm grateful - but not surprised - that she managed the situation in fine form. I think she only wanted to kill me once. Maybe twice.

But as the saying goes, time - and drugs - heal all woujnds, and by Wednesday I was able to get around enough to go to the baby's two month check up and into work. I'm still a little tender with some movements (getting into the car, for example), but I'd say I'm 85 percent and rising.

So whatever you plan on doing today, take a second to think about your back, and where you'd be if you were stuck on it for the weekend (and not in a good way).

So a while back I mentioned that I'd been selected for federal jury duty, and that I was trying to get a deferment as it fell right during our May graduation. Turns out my concerns were adjudged reasonable, as the feds have allowed me to push things back by a couple of weeks. It was a quick and painless sort of deal, quite unlike the stereotypical bureaucratic nightmare.

So, of course, the state judicial system had to jump in and ruin the moment by summoning me for jury duty in July.

It may not be all that bad, as one of the categories for dismissal from state service is currently scheduled jury service. It just wasn't clear if federal jury duty counts, but I'm going to give it a go. I'm not expecting much.