In Chicago

Well I’m in Chicago with my wife and I gotta say that I love the city. It’s pretty busy. So much so that I don’t think that I would want to go to New York City. Chicago is just about perfect. Not too busy but not too boring either. It seems like NYC would be fucking hectic all the time. I however have never been to NYC so this is just a guess.

I love the John Hancock building. It’s just beautiful. I’ve not even been in it yet but I can see it from my hotel room. We’ll head up and eat at the top later today most likely. I love the white lights at the top at night.

I’m sitting in the hotel right now in a “window seat”. It’s a seat beside the window that’s really long enough and wide enough to sleep on. Since I’m on the 10th floor I can see the stuff going on below and it’s really cool. I look out the window and see the John Hancock building and it’s a marvel of engineering. Wow.

It’s about 73 degrees here today and overcast. Looks like it’s gonna rain. I can see the lake and it doesn’t look like it has many waves. I’m used to Lake Erie which gets really big waves due to it’s shallow nature.

The old Water Tower and the old #98 Fire Station are really cool. Old school at it’s best.

Giordano’s Pizza is what we had for dinner last night. It was the best pizza I have ever had. I love it. I wish I could take a whole bunch home.

I’m happy I’m here in Chicago.

Anxiety and weird feeling on the front of my neck

So over the past 3 to 5 days I’ve been having this weird feeling at the base of the front of my neck. It’s not so much pain as it is annoying. It’s really hard to describe. It’s almost as if someone is holding their hands around my neck yet doing it lightly. I can breath fine and I don’t have any shortness of breath. I have had anxiety and “worry” issues for years now. I take Zoloft regularly and I take Xanax on an “as needed” basis.

I’m the type of person that gets all worked up about something like this and thinks “oh no, there must be something wrong with my heart or maybe my carotid arteries are clogged or something. I tend to go a bit overboard with trying to “self diagnose”. The Internet is not a help these days it just makes it worse it seems.

I try to get a good cardio workout in at least 3 times a week where I walk fast on the treadmill and get my heart rate up to about 155bpm and keep it there for about 30 or 40 minutes. I did this on Monday and my neck/upper chest felt funny the entire time. No different than when I am not exercising.

In the past I have had blood work done, a stress test, Holter monitor etc, just because I’m anal about shit and want to make sure I’m “OK”. I had all this done about 3 years ago. The docs all said everything was just fine.

Right now I am 6′1″ tall and I weigh 280 lbs. I used to weigh 314 lbs. but I lost the weight and still need to lose more. I don’t smoke, I drink occasionally but usually it’s about 2-3 beers a week at most. If not beer it’s Chianti (wine).

If I am standing up and I bend forward 90 degrees like I am half way to touching my toes, I can feel the weird feeling in my neck get worse. It’s almost like pressure. If I didn’t know any better I would say that I had pressure on my carotid arteries or something. The feeling has been with me constantly today. Not pain…..just annoying kind of weird pressure. It feels kind of similar to feelings I have had in the past when I have had anxiety real bad or some sort of anxiety attack. However if I take Xanax usually I’m fine after a short while. In this case I take Xanax and it helps a bit but the feeling doesn’t go completely away.

I have no idea what it is. I did talk to my doctor today on the phone and she said that this could be anxiety induced and that if I’m not better by next week she would like to see me.

I really just wanted to share this in case anyone else has had something like this and knows what this is. I also figured this may help someone who is having the same feelings.

Update on Internet Explorer 8 (working fine now)

So in my previous post I stated how I hated IE8, at least on my home PC.  Well here is what I found out.

It all had to do with Spybot Search & Destroy software.  I removed that application and then followed the instructions here .  That site explains how the antispyware software puts all these restricted sites into the restricted sites list and that IE goes through that list before starting up to the home page when you launch IE8 and/or open a new tab.  I downloaded the Deldomains.inf file and then right clicked on it and chose “install”.  It did it’s thing and fixed my issue.

I have to give all credit to this fix to the nice folks at www.mvps.org .  Great site and good people.

Due to this I have IE8 running on everything I own (even my couch) and I have no problems and it’s much faster than IE7.  I love it.

Gotta give mad props to Microsoft for this browser.  It’s finally a step in the right direction!!!