Lying in bed, face up to the ceiling may the hardest thing Ive had to do. The lack of variation may be the worst part; I am not a body that can watch TV for long so it is off.
Going to escape and find a book if I can avoid the warden.
(just kidding, honey, put down the rolling pin…)
As noted in a previous post, I had surgery yesterday to replace the first metatarsal in my right foot.
As far as Im aware, it all went good; I didnt get to talk to the surgeon but the nurse didnt give me dirty looks on the way out which is a good sign that I behaved myself.
The nerve block wore off earlier so the pain is increasing. I just took some medication and the youngest (my current nurse) has just dropped off for his nap so Im going to do the same.
So I’ve known for a little while that emails from my site weren’t making it to my inbox but I thought it was someone/something else that was causing it.
Nope. My fault.
I had set filters in Gmail to skip the inbox and mark the messages as read. This means that notification of comments or comments held for moderation were not making it to me. Since I don’t post by logging into the site but from either Twitter or from Microsoft Live Writer it sometimes took a few weeks for me to notice.
I am working up a bit of a site redesign as well as a re-imagining of my site, tentatively planned for the first of the year. Hopefully that will make up for my negligence.
Stay tuned.
photo by by gemsling
So, I’ve been back from southern China for a week now. A full week of falling asleep at 8 or 9 PM and waking at 2 or 3 AM, wide awake and ready to start the day.
Of course, I can’t actually start the day because I’ll wake the rest of the house so I creep down to my office and watch CNN. I pretend that I’ll work on my NaNoWriMo novel in just FIVE MORE MINUTES but I don’t, I just play Scramble or Hero Battle, read the comics and catch up on the events of the day.
This is my plea to my readers (both of you): Any solutions for adjusting your sleep schedule to something approaching normal? I’ve tried Melatonin, I’ve tried limiting my caffeine intake, and I’ve tried making myself stay up late. I haven’t tried any sleep aids, such as Ambien, as I don’t want to medicate if I don’t have to.
Please leave any remedies or techniques in the comments. Thanks!
As you may have heard, we have been in the process of adding to our family and, as of Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 11:43 A.M., we have a new boy in the family.
Ain’t he cute?
Since it was more formal (in a legal way) than our first boy’s adoption, we were sworn in by the bailiff (including the Boy) and both the baby’s attorney and our attorney were there along with our DCFS case worker. Lots of my family were also in the court room.
We gave our testimony to the judge and the the boy held his new baby brother, who laughed and made faces, enough so that we think the judge was laughing as well. The boy gave his testimony and had a bit of a chat with the judge; the judge reminded him of the duties of the eldest as the judge was also the oldest kid in his family. By the time it was done, my mom and aunts were crying a bit but it was very nice and all.
Plus, it is OVER.
I tried for several pictures with my phone to get a decent picture of the new little one after the hearing but he was wiggling about and wouldn’t hold still. This is as close as I could get to a non-blurred picture. Others in the group took pictures but I haven’t got them yet so this is as good of one as you all get right now. It is also the last time he’ll be in that vest as it fits him JUST RIGHT and at the rate he is going it won’t in a couple of weeks.
On my recent visit back to Shenzhen, China, we had a little… adventure. We were staying at this very nice, posh hotel. It was clean, nice location, large, comfortable rooms – nearly perfect. Until we went to bed, that it is. Sleeping that night was miserable. The bed was basically a slab of plywood with some batting on it. I called down and asked them to do something about it; change rooms, change bed, something.
They brought up a couple of comforters and put them under the bed sheet. A minor adjustment at best and it didn’t do much. Soooo uncomfortable.
The next day, with the thought of that bed waiting for us at the hotel, we decided to fix the problem.We walked over to WalMart, about a five minute walk and bought some air mattresses (five of them). Oh, also a case of water, ’cause you really can’t drink water from the tap here.
We then wheeled the shopping cart with the boxes of mattresses (and a case of bottled water) through the park, across the street, down the alley. Carried the cart up the stairs and then wheeled it THROUGH THE LOBBY, into the elevator and up to the 16th floor.
Giggling the whole time.
Earlier in the day, we had talked to the hotel management and they didn’t have a solution for us for this trip. As we rolled the cart through the lobby, the hotel management staff had no clue what to do with us.
We dispersed the materials (including the bottled water) and then two of us took the cart back to WalMart. I didn’t go to return the cart, but the report back was that the WalMart staff cheered when they took the cart back – they didn’t know what to do with the crazy Americans and we think they were trying to decide whether or not to go after the cart when we returned it.
So, as some of you might know, I can be quite a "Grumpy Gus" at times. However, I am quite aware of this and actively try not to be and, at least in my head, I’m moderately successful. I’ve even had people comment that I’m upbeat and positive when stuff isn’t going well and they think I’m a bit loony, which is fine. I know that if I act as if I’m in a good mood then, in a few minutes, I’ll be in a good mood.
However, today I read a comic strip (and boy do I love my comics) which summed up my goal in my personal philosophy, quoted here:
Ya set yer expectations to "grim" an’ each day is like Christmas!
Exactly.
I’m finally, finally done for the day. Checking out at… 11:55 PM to drive home and crawl into bed.
My head is full of cobwebs,
My jaw is full of pain.
Time to crash,
perchance to dream,
then do it all again.
So, this tells us that if you keep me up too late too many days in a row and get me up too early the next day too many days in a row then you get really bad poetry.
Sunday night we went to visit my mom’s for the evening. For January, it wasn’t too bad with the temperature hovering around 30-35 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the snow that was on the ground was melted or melting away and I neglected to take a jacket. Didn’t even notice much. I had parked the disposable car on the street to get the van out of the driveway and when we returned I didn’t bother to pull it back in the drive.
Bad idea.
Monday morning, a holiday for me (kind of) I slept in a bit, finally stirring around 10:00 AM. I had been up late the night before, cleaning and organizing and hadn’t gone to bed until around 3:00 AM. Yes, that is kind of normal for me. When I got up and wandered into the living room I was startled to find that we had received about 10 inches of snow to that point since the night before and it was still coming down. I like the snow and I don’t usually mind shoveling it, the act of shoveling can be very therapeutic and it gives me time alone inside my head.
Unless, of course, you have to dig out from a lot of it. By the time I got outside in the afternoon to shovel it off we had a full 12 inches of fluffy snow. I pulled out my handy Honda snow thrower and then remembered that it needed new blades; sure enough, it couldn’t hack the snow. Falling back to a shovel, I cleared the drive, the sidewalk and cleaned off the van in the drive. My neighbor had offered the use of his two stage snow thrower so I wandered over and messed about and got it running.
Man, I have got to get one of those machines! It took about an hour, but I cleared the sidewalk to the corner and two of my neighbor’s drives in addition to the rest of mine until it started acting up. I returned it, dug the disposable car out with a shovel and parked it in the drive – it was 7:00 PM by that point and I had work to do.
I lived the first 10 years of my life about eight blocks from where I live now – I remember going to the park and marveling at the expanse of snow when it dropped a lot, just like what I imagined the Arctic to be like. I went to Utah State University and learned that those wimpy snow storms I was used to were nothing compared to a solid Logan winter. USU is at the mouth of Logan canyon and when it was 10 degrees with a 40 mile per hour morning wind it was really, really uncomfortable.
Fun though. As part of a journalism assignment I went with a student meteorologist up Logan canyon to the top; he was measuring the temperatures in a series of natural bowls that in the winter had record temperatures. We parked along the side of the highway and began to climb down into the bowl, the video camera batteries inside our heavy coats to keep them warm enough to use. Every 10 vertical feet the temperature dropped 5 to 7 degrees until we reached the weather station where, in the bright sunshine, the still air temperature was -35 degrees Fahrenheit. We set up the camera on the tripod, got ready to open up the weather station and slapped the battery on the camera – at that temp, we would have about 10 minutes of camera time. He opened the weather station to discover…
… that his thermometer had exploded at -72 degrees Fahrenheit sometime the night before, just shy of a record temp. We recorded as much as we could for the local news broadcast and then, when the battery was spent, loaded up and raced up to the car.
I lived in Logan for six years and I still miss it. Winters were really winters and summer was pleasant. Even when it was hot it really wasn’t that hot and you could always escape up the canyon to go camping where it was cool. I didn’t have lots of responsibility so if I decided to hop on the motorcycle and go to Yellowstone or Bear Lake or just up to the campgrounds at third dam I did.
At times I imagine returning to that time of my life and then reality kicks in – it wasn’t always idyllic; I just remember it that way. As I write this I’m flying at 35,000 feet on my way to San Francisco for work. It is a long way from the naive optimistic idiot I used to be, but so far it has been a fun, interesting ride.