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.

Patches is happy. Jen was scheduled to come home tomorrow, but she came home tonight!

I’m wicked happy too! Welcome home, my love!

Okay, this post is going to make you think I am a total tool.  It’s probably going to make you hate me and never want to come back to this idiotic page again.

You’ve been warned.

Back in the early 1990’s a friend of mine dragged me out to eat at a place in Harvard Square.  It was a Tex-Mex place and I hated Tex-Mex.  I am the world’s pickiest eater (one of them, at least) and I hate almost everything.

The place was The Border Cafe.  Not only did I like it, but it sort of became an important part of my whole friend group experience.  Cambridge, MA is about half an hour away from where we were all living at the time (not counting traffic) so it had to be an event to get everyone together to go.  Border Runs, we called them.  Clever.

As stated, I hate all food (I weigh a ton, so it’s hard to equate my gut with being a picky eater.  You just have to deal with it) but I found a couple of dishes on the menu that I liked a lot.  We all did.  Everyone else was getting the Pollo con Jamon (sp?), but I got the French Quarter Chicken.  It’s just a boneless chicken breast in a lemony sauce.  I liked it.  It was good.  I almost always ordered it, with jambalaya on the side.

Over the years things changed a little.  There was another Border Cafe opened in Saugus, MA.  We tried it.  It wasn’t the same.  We kept going to Cambridge.  At some point they took the Pollo con Jamon (sp?) off the menu and there was much sadness.  Much later, they opened a new restaurant in Burlington, MA.  Again, it wasn’t the same but this time it was really close to home and easy to get to.  Over time, we started making our Border Runs there.

Eventually the quality of the food started to go down some.  It got harder and harder to get us all together.  We started having families.  My wife liked it, but my step kids didn’t.  The worst though was when they started putting cheese into the lemony sauce on the French Quarter Chicken.  It was heartbreaking.  I resigned myself to always having to order my #2 choice, the Blackened Chicken.  Still excellent, but not the same.

In the late 90’s we learned that there were Border Cafes in New Jersey, though they had a different name, Jose Tejas.  It was the same decor, the same menu, the same everything.  I’ve never been to one, and I sort of forgot about them.

Until this week.

My beloved wife, Jen is in New Jersey for a business trip.  On Sunday she went to a Jose Tejas.  She ordered the French Quarter Chicken.  She sent me a picture because it’s 2019 and that’s what you do.  She said it was a little spicier than at home but it was good.  I asked the question… she answered… is there cheese in the sauce (gag!)?  No.  There is no cheese in the sauce.

A wave of delicious Tex-Mex nostalgia washed over my dumb ass.  Without planning it, I had actually had lunch at the Border in Burlington earlier on the same day.  I got the Blackened Chicken as usual.  I hate cheese.  I hate it so much (doesn’t stop me from eating pizza though.  It doesn’t make sense.  Just accept it).  I wanted to experience the purity of 1990’s French Quarter Chicken again.  I decided to take a risk.

Last night on the way home from work I decided to go to the Border again and order it.  I got nervous as I approached the Middlesex Turnpike exit off of route 128 in Burlington though.  I didn’t want to be disappointed.  That settled it.  I was going to Saugus.  I hadn’t been to the Saugus branch in 20 years, but I was going.  Maybe that would change my French Quarter luck.

It did.

It was the flavor equivalent of angel trumpets and devil trombones playing together in the sweetest of sweet harmony.  It was culinary bliss.  Oh what happy, lemony goodness!

Thank you, Jennifer my love. Thank you for putting the thought into my head. I miss you so much it’s awful, but even though you are 189 miles away right now, you still found a way to brighten my day.

She’s coming home tomorrow. I cannot wait. I literally cannot wait.

I went to bed at a few minutes after 11:00pm last night, and at some point a few hours later I screwed up.

I felt like I was having a hard time getting to sleep, but the SleepWatch app says I was under by 11:15.  I’m having more and more doubts about the usefulness of this app.  More on that a little later.

I woke up about an hour later needing to fix the mask again, as usual.  I stopped the machine, took off the mask, put the mask back on, and restarted the machine.  All was well.  I fell back to sleep almost immediately.  I did all right for a while, but at some point, and I’m not sure when (the SleepWatch app makes it look like 3:00am, but the MyAir app looks like 2:00am), I had to fix the mask again.  This time I shut off the machine, took off the mask, and then it was 4:30am.  Umm… ooops.  I woke up with the mask on the bed next to me.  I don’t know if I slept for an hour and a half or for two and a half hours.  Let’s just average it to two hours.  That’s no good.  I put the mask back on and restarted the machine again and slept like a log until my alarm woke me at 6:00.

I figured something like this would happen eventually, and it’s likely to become a semi regular thing as I get more and more used to sleeping with a big plastic alien thing sucking on my face.  I’m going to get to a point where the mask waking me up is not going to be an event of Earth shattering importance and I’m going to start falling asleep right away.  I just have to try and be more careful.  It’s also likely that if I do fall asleep without putting the mask back on, my wife will wake up and yell at me (hi sweetie!) because I’ll be snoring like a nuclear blast powered chainsaw.

The thing that bugs me a little is how the SleepWatch app read things during that mask-free sleep.  The numbers looked almost identical to the night before.  Lots of deep sleep with short little bursts of light sleep mixed in.  In other words, no sign of apnea.  I expected to clearly see the time frame when the CPAP machine was off.  I thought it would show a combination of disrupted sleep and light sleep and that was all.  Nope.  It looked like every other night so far.  That was a little disappointing.

Note to self:  Don’t fall asleep without putting the mask back on.

Noted.

 

Addendum: I should note that I do feel much more tired today that I have over the last few days (the one night with less than four hours of sleep being the exception).  Is that proof that the CPAP machine is helping me, or is it just a coincidence.  You decide.

Today is July 1st.  My unspoken self-challenge has ended.  What am I talking about?

In true uber-nerd fashion, on June 1st I challenged myself to make better use of this here blog thingie.  I told myself that I would try to actually write a post each day, rather than just post random pictures with mini-captions.  I was going to use the blog like I used to when I was starting out and not just as a personal Instagram the way I had been in recent months.  I was able to write something on most days.  Some of them look more like Instagrammies with longer than normal captions, but they count.  There were a few days with just pic posts.  That was okay.  The CPAP drama helped.

Speaking of CPAP drama, another slightly better than bad night’s sleep.  SleepWatch says I was under for 6:05, with 4:20 being restful.  I’ve been struggling to get that total over six hours.  It also says there were only two interruptions.  That’s a big change.  It’s also wrong, as there were technically more than that.  MyAir says I took the mask off six times.  I don’t remember that many though.  Maybe I took it off and put it back on without waking up?  Not likely.

I had one moment of major frustration.  I went to bed at 11:15.  My wife is away on a business trip so I had the bed to myself.  I wanted to be very careful about how I started off.  I put the mask on, made sure the seal was good, and lay down on my back in the middle of the bed with a couple of pillows propping up my head.  I was really comfy but I didn’t fall asleep right away.  Again, I think I kept myself awake by focusing on how I was breathing.  25 minutes later the mask came unsealed.  I once again threw a mini temper tantrum and anyone outside of the house would have heard me swearing at a loud volume.  I put the mask back on and fell right to sleep.  It came off again almost exactly one hour later.  After that, I remember it coming off once more, a couple of hours later, and that was it.  I actually needed my alarm clock to wake me up.  That doesn’t happen often for me.  I’m usually awake before it goes off.  So maybe last night was actually better than the numbers showed?  I still feel a little tired today, but no worse than any other day.  Here’s hoping it’s a sign of actual improvement.

I’m sitting here at work, eating my brown bag lunch, and I’m starting to get nervous.  I’m starting to worry.  The kids are flying home from vacation today and their plane is scheduled to depart in about half an hour.  Everything is going to be fine and everything is going to be fine and everything is going to be fine.  I just can’t help but be nervous.  If I were on the plane with them I wouldn’t be nervous at all, but I’m not so I am.  Safe flight, guys.

Band practice was okay last night.  Nothing of any real note.  I swapped a couple of dirt pedals before we started and I think I sounded really good (not that I’m an objective observer or anything) but I didn’t play very well.  My stamina is way down, and the calluses on my finger tips are pretty much gone.  I just over did it.  I spent about 90 minutes practicing on my own yesterday afternoon, and by the time rehearsal started I was already feeling pain and fatigue.  I did okay, but I should have put more time in between practicing and rehearsing.  My finger tips are still burning now.  I did sound pretty good though.

I am thinking about going to Guitar Center after work and picking up a Shure SM57 microphone to use for recording 50/90 demos.  I thought about stealing one from the band room last night, but I don’t want to mess with the recording setup I have.  I am in the habit of recording rehearsals into GarageBand now.  It doesn’t sound great, but it’s a zillion times better than recording with my iPhone and I don’t want to screw anything up by moving mics around.  SM57s are cheap.  I also want to get a mic cable and a boom stand, and a small speaker cable to use with the attenuator I ordered the other day.  My shipment has a tracking number, but it hasn’t made it to the post office yet.  Fingers crossed I don’t have to wait long.  I’m looking forward to cranking my Deluxe Reverb without shattering my skull.  That’ll be fun for recording.

I promise if I go to Guitar Center I will not test drive a new Les Paul Standard (the one with the 1950’s style neck) because once I play one of those beauties I am not going to be able to stop myself from buying one.  I pinky swear.

20 minutes left before the kids’ plane takes off.  I’ve got the flight aware page open and zoomed in on their location.  I should be home before they land.  I’m going to stress out the whole time, but I know they will be fine.

Get home safe, you two.