Tag: health

Sunday Morning Thoughts

I’m up and showered and ready to face the day and all that. I went to sleep at about quarter to one am. I woke up a couple of times before waking up for good at about quarter to five am. My AppleWatch tells me I failed to reach four hours of sleep. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t do it. Early to bed tonight, I guess.

Two WordPress.com items of note:

  1. I have recently gained a handful of new followers here. That’s nice, right? They all have the same profile image. Well… that’s not good. It doesn’t appear to be porn spam, which is nice, but it does appear to be spam of some kind, which isn’t good.
  2. What’s up with stats? WordPress.com has a stats page that keeps all sorts of information, including page view counts and unique visitors, sorted by days, weeks, months, and years. There is also a page called insights which is supposed to be like a summary page. I noticed last month that the view counts on the insight page were off. Not just for that month, but for a whole bunch of random months over the life of this account. I found this off putting because the analyst side of my programmer/analyst brain likes digging through the stats. I was hoping it was just a bug in the calculation and WordPress.com would fix it. Nope. It seems to have gotten worse. Yesterday I checked the stats just before midnight. I had a healthy number of views for the day (thank, folks!) and given that it was the first of the month the day and month counts matched. I went to insight, which defaults to monthly counts, and it gave me a big goose egg of a zero. Huh? Sometimes it takes a few seconds to update, but it never did. I checked the stats again just before starting to write this post and I had one view for the day. I checked insight and it showed one view for the month. It basically skipped yesterday. What the hell, bro?

What else is going on? The Bruins won yesterday, They are a point away from clinching a playoff spot (I think) with five or six games left to go (I think). Color me cautiously optimistic. The Red Sox lost last night. They play in Texas again this afternoon. I thought the Rangers avoided day games at home, but I guess it’s still early enough in the spring that they won’t bake the players and the fans in the afternoon heat. Speaking of fans, the stadium was full for last night’s game. I guess Covid’s over, right? Texas says so. I hope they have contact tracing available for the thousands of folks who went to the game as an outbreak is pretty much inevitable.

Dad called a few minutes ago. He’s hooked up to an IV. Antibiotics, I’m sure. He said he thought he was going to have physical therapy this morning, but how can he do that when they have him plugged in? The hospital has limited visiting hours and you have to make an appointment ahead of time and you can only make one appointment per week. I’m going Wednesday. I haven’t seen him since January. I’m looking forward to a visit. Once again let me put my vaccination to work.

Happy Sunday, everyone. Can’t wait to go home and see Jen and Harry. Until then, I’m trying to make the best of it by writing really long, boring, uninformative blog posts. Cheerio, all.

Almost Bed Time

The Red Sox lost, I did a load of laundry, my mother sat up for about an hour before going back to bed, I watched an episode of That Pedal Show that is making me want to go into cellar storage and find my cheap uni-vibe pedal, I wrote the music for another song that could possibly make good use of a cheap uni-vibe pedal, and the first episode of season four of The Handmaids Tale has some seriously dark shit in it.

I’ll be turning in soon. Here’s hoping my mother sleeps through the night. She was asleep when I got here. She woke up a couple of hours later thinking it was morning. I asked her if she wanted dinner as she was fishing out a package of instant oatmeal for breakfast. Hashtag, le sigh.

Here Comes the Existential Pain

It’s April 30th. The last day of the month. Normally that’s not a big deal, but this month… this month…

April 2021 is the last full month of my forties. There is a day in the month of May… a day that is coming soon… a day that the first digit in my age changes, and that is a bad thing. When it changed from zero to one it was awesome. When it changed from one to two it was also awesome. When it changed from two to three… well that sucked. That sucked bad. When it changed from three to four it was painful but by then the damage was done, and I also had Jen to make me feel better about it.

Four changing to five feels about the same as three to four, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. I’ve got eight days left. Eight days left in my forties, which I didn’t even want in the first place but now that they are ending…

crap.

…….and I just found out my friend’s kid has Covid. The universe is a prick.

12:15 AM

12:15 AM on a Wednesday morning and the phone rings. Not my phone, my parents landline.

It was a reverse 911 call asking for help finding and 85 year old woman with dementia who got out of the house and got lost.

Damn… that’s not our current situation, but it’s close enough that I haven’t been able to fall asleep.

Scary stuff.

Lunch Time

(Marvel spoilers in the second paragraph. You have been warned)

Just wrapping up my lunch break today. The clean up this morning went well. There are two places in our side yard that used to have crap piled up to the moon that now do not. One step closer to having a presentable yard. Sigh of relief, you know?

I’ve been listening to some podcasts today. It’s reassuring to know that my favorite Walking Dead podcast (The Walking Deadcast) is also completely fed up with Fear the Walking Dead. Sometimes it’s just helpful to know you aren’t alone. More important on the news front, I’m listening to TV Podcast Industry’s review of the season finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. They opened up discussing the announcement (that I completely missed) that the follow up to season one will not be season two, it will be a Captain America movie. I think that sounds like a great idea. We knew that the follow up to WandaVision was going to be a movie, the next Dr Strange movie, so it is fitting they do the same for Uncle Sam. Will the Power Broker be the villain? Will it be Elaine Benes? Is Elaine Benes a bad guy or a good guy?

Just heard that my father had a good doctors appointment today. Good news.

Okay, back to work with you.

Nothing

I have nothing to say tonight. The cat isn’t even around for a photo shoot. Jen and Harry and I are just hanging out, watching The Flash. Killer Frost is kicking ass, the Bruins lost, the Red Sox are tied, my father is sick, and I’m still basically helpless.

The usual.

Exercise and Sleep

Exercise helps me sleep. I have irrefutable anecdotal proof, or something.

The SleepWatch app for ages used to tell me that the closer I got to the goal on the Apple Watch Activities calorie counter (the Move goal) the better my sleep numbers would be. When I started the 30 minutes a day exercise thing last September I saw that my sleep numbers improved quite a bit.

A few months ago, late January I think, I stopped getting even the minuscule amount of exercise I was getting and saw that my sleep numbers got pretty bad. The restful sleep count went down. So did the sleeping heart rate dip. Everything that seemed to correspond to me feeling better the next day was worse which meant I felt much crappier than I had when I was exercising.

On April 1st I started getting my 30 minutes in again. After only seven days I can already see the sleep numbers getting better again. Especially the heart rate. The last few days have been excellent. Now I’m not really feeling any better rest-wise yet but here’s hoping that comes along eventually. There’s a lot of bad shit going on in life right now. I need all the help I can get.

I Hate When That Happens

The alarm was set for 6:00 AM. I woke up at 5:50. I felt pretty good. I slept for about six hours or so and all was well. I got up and started my morning…

…and 10 minutes later I was up and about and felt like I hadn’t slept in days.

Why do you want to be like that, sleep cycle? If I’m not ready to wake up don’t make me feel like I’m ready to wake up!

Sometimes my brain is a complete jerk, you know?