If you thought I was playing as any character other than the red head, you thought wrong.

Yesterday was the 4th of July.  I once read that back around the time of the Centennial, 1876, it was common for people to celebrate Independence by picking fights with their unliked neighbors by calling them British.  They also used to celebrate the fact that they themselves were not British.  Ever since reading that story (wherever it was that I read it) I have felt the need to celebrate Independence Day by saying, “hooray, we’re not British!”  I think everyone who has heard it is plenty sick of hearing it, yet I still do it.  So….

Hooray, we’re not British!

All four of us were home for the whole day yesterday.  We did some serious flaking in the morning and early afternoon.  It was nice to just be home together without running around like nuts for whatever reason.  For dinner we had a cookout.  Jen prepped everything and cooked almost everything, but I cooked the steaks (yay, I helped!) on the grill.  Jen picked up some really good stuff at McKinnon’s in Salem.  It was sooo good.  After dinner we piled into the family truckster and headed north to Dover, NH.  Why?  Because we wanted fireworks and all the towns near us seemed to have had their fireworks on the 3rd.  We got lost wandering around the town a little bit and eventually ended up in front of a bandstand watching a military band play funk tunes.  Weird, but good.  Then we swung around to the other side of the bandstand where there was a nice little park and watched the fireworks.  Perfect.

Since Dover is far away (about an hour) from home, and because fireworks require darkness, and because it’s Summer (thank goodness, it’s finally here) and it stays light out until almost 9:00, we didn’t get home until really late.  I am the only one who needed to get up this morning so I dove straight to bed.  I plugged my face into my CPAP machine and was asleep by quarter to midnight.  I woke up at 6:00.  There were three wake ups and my Apple Watch caught them all.  I got a little less than six hours of sleep total, with four being deep sleep.  That’s about the same as most nights.  The good news is I only had to take my mask off twice.  Progress.  Also, I didn’t snore at all.  I cannot overstate how glorious that is.

The 50/90 songwriting challenge kicked off yesterday as well (fiftyninety.fawmers.org) and I was able to sneak in a little work.  There are three ideas underway.  None of them are terribly inspiring.  One will probably be a strummy acoustic 12-string thingie.  Another is in 7/8 with a little electric piano part.  Nothing special.  I hope to make more progress tonight.

I hope you enjoyed your 4th of July (where applicable), and I hope you got a good night’s sleep (where applicable), and I hope you spend the next couple of months writing music (where applicable).

And in closing… Hooray, we’re not British (where applicable)!

I didn’t win one, but in the 20 minutes between going on sale and selling out, I got one. 👍

Another night’s worth of sleep data to review.

It’s all about average.  I went to bed at 11:00ish and woke up before 6:00.  I didn’t have as much trouble as usual with the mask coming unsealed.  It happened once or twice, but not bad.  That’s good news.  The trouble I had was that I woke up at 3:45 or so to use the bathroom, I couldn’t fall back to sleep.  I wasn’t wide awake, but I wasn’t feeling sleepy.  I surfed the web on my iPad for a bit and then at 4:20 or so I tried sleeping.  It took a while, but I managed.

Yesterday during my lunch break I spent some time on reddit looking for CPAP groups.  I received a lot of encouragement from people saying that it took them months to get used to the machine enough to let them sleep through the night.  There were a bunch of helpful people with first hand personal experiences telling me to stick with it and not get discouraged.  I appreciate that.  It’s nice to know that there is nothing wrong with me.  Or at least there might not be anything wrong with me.

When I woke up for good I took off the mask, shut off the machine, propped myself up in bed, grabbed my iPad and a pair of headphones, and started working on the first 50/90 song of the year.  Now there are two things that no one else on Earth cares about that I can flood this page with.  Nice.

Today at 11:00 Fulltone, the guitar pedal manufacturer, is raffling off six of the new germanium OCD pedals.  After that they are making 100 available to people on their mailing list.  My name is in the raffle.  Wish me luck. Failing that, I’m hoping to be able to order one of those pedals.  Wish me luck again.  If I win you will probably hear the emphatic “WOOHOO” from whatever little corner of Earth you happen to be on at the time.

Happy 4th of July, or as I said on Facebook this morning (pretending I was clever, but really just being a stupid douchebag) Happy Birthday, USA!

We are three and a half hours away from the start of the 2019 50/90 challenge.

The rig is officially ready.

I’m still not 100% sold on the Keeley pedal.  I might swap it out for either the Joyo OCD clone, or the Dan side of the D&M Drive or (if I win one in the raffle tomorrow) the new germanium OCD pedal.  Other than that, the only thing left for me to do is mic the amps.

Well, mic the amps and write 50 songs.

How’s that for a snobby title?  You like that?  Every once in a while I feel the need to demonstrate that deep down everything you read on this stupid page comes from a Rush fan.  Neil Peart is my literary spirit guide.

Three items of note from last night’s sleep experience.  First, I went to bed a little after 10:00, about an hour earlier than every other night this week.  The interesting thing there is that I managed to stay asleep for almost two hours before I had an issue.  It was just after midnight when I woke up the first time.  It was the mask again, but two hours before the first issue is much better than 25 minutes.  I woke up again a little after one, and then again a little before three, and then again at 4:30 or so, but that one was bladder related, not mask related.  I woke up for good a few minutes before 6:00.

The second item of note is from the Apple Watch SleepWatch app again.  It shows my sleep period as 10:25 to 5:45.  That’s about right.  There is a period of disruption that corresponds to the first wake up, and another for the last wake up, though that one seems a little too long to me.  The problem is that it had me awake from 1:35 to 3:10 and that is not even close.  The start time is about right, so is the end time, but I was out cold for the whole period in between. It says I was asleep for five hours and five minutes with only three hours and 15 minutes of deep sleep.  The CPAP machine says it was in use for six hours and 49 minutes.  That’s a little more like it, though I was awake for some of that time.  Just another example of the watch data being inaccurate.

The third thing, and this is the big one, is that for the first time in a really long time… a really, really long time…. I clearly remember dreaming.  I have no idea what I was dreaming about, but I know that at some point after my 3:00ish wake up I had a dream.  The tech who reviewed my sleep study with me said I was never getting into either stage three, or REM stage sleep.  Last night I absolutely got into REM.  I feel like having a huge celebration.  Maybe a cookout tomorrow or something?  Maybe some fireworks?

The downside of all of this is that I feel pretty tired this morning.  I’ve been yawning a lot.  Let’s see how I do through the day.

Happy Dream Day!

Well… my name is anyway.