Tag: health

More Nothing

Another lunch break with out much to talk about. We had plans to go up to Burlington to see the kids this weekend, but the weather is looking bad and thanks to Covid we want to stay outside so we’re looking at rescheduling. I guess I don’t quite need to have Bellana’s Fall laundry done tonight after all. I’ll still try though.

This is going to be broken record-esque. but my back and my shoulders and my legs are killing me and I haven’t don’t any of my exercise yet today. Not good, Robert. Not good.

I started a new candle yesterday. When I lit it again this morning I started a time lapse video. I’ll post it later today and you can bask in the glory of the glorious gloriousness of the candle burning time lapse iPad video.

This has felt like a super long week, but it hasn’t been particularly long at all. I think the start of October just makes everything suck. Not that September’s generally any better. Hang on to it as long as you can though. Don’t leave, September! Stay with me!

I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about anymore.

Okay, back to work. Lunch break is over.

Feeling Lost

I feel so weird right now. I feel lost, somehow. At home, I had a huge music project that I was completely wrapped up in and now it’s done. At work I got flattened by a runaway train that is now back on the tracks.

Now what?

Those two things have kept the CPU in my head running at close to 100% capacity for most of the last month. Now that I’ve moved on from both things my CPU is down to a much more normal operating level and that is all kinds of good, but the rest of my brain is less occupied than it was and doesn’t know what to do with itself.

I had an idea to take the 10 least awful songs from the last three months and redo them in the hopes of improving them. I listened through everything and picked the songs I want to try, but I’m already losing interest.

What should I do? Part of me wants to just spend a few weeks watching TV, but I should do better than that, shouldn’t I?

I just don’t know what to do with myself.

I found a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in the junk food closet. I just ate a bunch of them and now I feel sick. I guess I ate too much. Somehow that is symbolic of my mental state. Blah, barf.

Gore

Last Friday I burned my hand on one of the racks in the oven. I posted a picture. That night the burn blistered over. It wasn’t too gross, just a little unpleasant to look at. Jen said to me, “don’t pop that blister.” and I said in return, “no, I won’t pop that blister.”*

The next morning the shower had other plans. I took the band aide off, got into the shower, and next thing I knew the water had ripped that blister right off. Well that’s too bad. It looked pretty grody after that. I tried to keep it covered but somedays the band aides just wouldn’t stick. Yesterday was one of those days.

When I woke up today it had blistered over again. Finally. Heel, you sucker! Then I took a shower. Once again the water pressure ripped it off. Once again I didn’t see it happen. This time though… I looked down at my hand and it was covered with blood**.

I cleaned it up. Reverted to Boy Scout training and applied direct pressure until the bleeding stopped. I put some medicinal goop on it and got a new band aide to stick. All is well now.

Come on, you stupid injury. Scab over and heel, ya creep.

*Those may not be exact quotes. I tried to capture the spirit of the thing.***

**When I say covered in blood, that’s probably an exaggeration based on the fast approaching end of September and the imminent start of the month long Halloween season. Halloween is getting all like Christmas these days. Every year it starts earlier. HoHoBooHo.

***That is a direct quote. Dickie Dun, sports journalist covering the Charlestown Chiefs in the movie Slapshot.****

****Yes, I did put footnotes into my footnotes.

Describe Your Weekend

So Robert, why don’t you describe your weekend for us?

Okay. Saturday:

Sunday:

Notes: the hole in the stand hour streak on Saturday was due to my watch being on the charger. The hole on Sunday was due to being on a conference call, I think.

Catching Up

One hour of bad sleep on Saturday and six hours of bad sleep on Sunday. Yeah… it’s catching up with me. I am one sleepy red head right now.

15 minutes to go until I log out of my work computer. I’ve been logged in since about 4:00pm on Saturday and it’s 5:16pm on Monday. Well… I was out for a bit as I rebooted once this morning. I figured the lappy needed it after all the work I made it do this weekend. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I took tomorrow off to recover from the weekend. What should I do? Besides sleeping of course. Well there was mystery*… no, that’s not right. How about well there is music. I need to do car music. I have eight songs that need singing. Actually, I have 11 songs that need singing. I added two new song ideas to the list yesterday in a very not successful attempt to calm my ass down. There is also one little music memo thing that I added to the song list but it’s not very good so I will probably drop it. So…. eight songs ready for vocal tracks, two songs that still need to have their vocal parts written. Maybe car music in the morning and then more car music in the afternoon? Is that possible?

What else? Well there’s my desk. I have made the (likely temporary) decision to keep my work day desk setup in Harry’s room, but move my MacBook back to the desk in our bedroom. I like it better in our bedroom, but I have also found I really like working elsewhere. It was starting to feel like I never left that room. Now I will definitely be leaving it for 8.5 hours a day, five days per week.

Okay, work time is up. Time to go cook dinner for my love.

*There is a song by Bill Bruford’s fusion band, aptly called Bruford, called Fainting in Coils. It opens up with a quote from Alice and Wonderland where Dr Bruford reads the passage with his voice sent through a harmonizer and lowered an octave or so. There’s some other sauce on there too. Someone else reads some narration and then the good doctor’s voice comes in louder and right up in your face and the first thing he says is, “well, there was mystery.” In my massively sleep deprived state, that’s what I was thinking of as I was typing that paragraph. There. You’re in the know now.**

**Am I the only doofus who puts footnotes into meaningless blog posts? Yeah, I thought so too.

Back at Work/Still at Work

I stayed logged in at work until midnight last night. I sent out a note saying if you need me please call me and then I plopped my fat ass down on Harry’s bed and fell right to sleep. From about 7:00am on Saturday morning through 12:00am Monday morning on one hour and ten minutes of sleep. I honestly did not think that was physically possible. I would like to thank the academy, caffeine, Diet Pepsi, and copious amounts of adrenalin. I couldn’t have done it without you folks and I do love you all.

My watch tells me I got about 6.5 hours of sleep last night (6:25 to be exact). I did not have my CPAP machine though and it absolutely shows. I woke up three times and I don’t felt like the sleep I had was terribly restful. Granted, part of that was caffeine and another part was worrying about the customer I was working with. Still, I bet if I had that mask glued to my face I would have slept straight through. Who knows.

I just gave my boss all the news from the weekend. I told him I was putting in for tomorrow off. Yeah, you betcha.

Happy Monday, boys and girls!

Addendum: Oh, I haven’t watched last night’s episode of The Walking Dead yet. No spoilers, blah blah blah I can’t hear you blah blah blah!

Second Wind

When I was young and foolish and in my 20s I would occasionally pull an all nighter. I never really had a good reason to do it. I wasn’t a party guy who would stay out until the sun came up. No, I was a guy who had a part time night job who would sometimes come home and just not go to bed.

I can probably count the number of one nighters I have experienced on one hand. Maybe two hands. No, probably one hand. I’m trying to think of what my record is. I’m pretty sure I topped 30 hours once. Did I top 36? There’s a little part of my memory that is whispering 39 to me but that’s probably not accurate. I clearly remember getting to 29 once and being pissed I didn’t reach 30. When I remember 39 I’m probably just misremembering the 29. I wanna say I did 32 once but I’m not sure. 29 is definite, so let’s say that’s my record.

I did not pull an all nighter last night. I got up out of bed a little before 7:00am yesterday and I did go to sleep around 3:30am today. It’s just that as a 50 year old old fart, getting one hour of sleep is about as close to an all nighter as I will ever get again. I am hoping to take a nap at some point this afternoon, but I won’t know if I can definitely get one until I actually get one, you know?

I have been awake for 26 of the last 27 hours and I am in that weird second wind stage. You know, when you’re too tired to think straight but you somehow still feel energized? I just stepped away from work long enough to clean the cat’s litter box. She was giving me that, “clean the litter box now or else I kill you in your sleep” look so I figured I had better make the time. It’s no problem when you’re in the weird second wind state.

Check out the old guy, acting like he’s all young and shit. What a doofus.

Sleep is for Suckers, Boom!

I finished up the routines I needed to run last night at a little before 3:00am. I wanted to go to sleep right away but I was too wound up. I knew a call was going to be coming to start the next phase of the process but I didn’t know when. I wanted to get at least some sleep so I spent about half an hour cooling down and I was able to finally conk out at a little after 3:30.

The text messages asking us to log back in started at about 4:45.

I didn’t actually go to bed. At least not to my bed. My work setup is still in Harry’s room after the quarantinie adventure so I just dimmed the lights a little and laid down on his bed. I messed up his pillows a bit. Sorry about that.

The SleepWatch app tells me I got 70 minutes of sleep. 55 minutes were deep sleep, so I have that going for me. I reached 14% of my nightly goal. Kick ass.

I’ve got a feeling today is going to be one of those “do not operate heavy machinery” kinda days.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!

Flashback

I just had an unsettling parent sitting flashback. It probably has more to do with being really tired than anything else, but here’s the story…

There are exactly two drinks that I chose to drink at home. One is Diet Pepsi because regular Coca~Cola (my personal drug of choice) is the primary reason why I am as grotesquely fat as I currently am. The other is grape flavored water. We have a Poland Springs cooler which is amazing. I fill up a water bottle with spring water and then poor some of that liquid flavoring stuff into it. Fruit Punch is good. Lemonade is all right if you get the right brand. Grape flavoring rules all. Unfortunately it’s expensive and I am trying to cut down on how quickly I blow through bottles of it by just sometimes drinking plain old, boring spring water.

That’s the first back story. Here’s the second. During the parent sitting adventure I would take a water bottle full of the delicious grape flavored water. I would also bring a second water bottle, but it would not be drinking water. It would be distilled water for my CPAP machine.

(Pause for a second to check on work. I’m still working. We were supposed to start around 4:00pm on Saturday. We instead kicked off our piece of the puzzle at 11:00pm. It’s 2:10am on Sunday and I’m still going strong.)

Here’s the flashback moment. Since dinner time I have had two 32 ounce water bottles full of the delicious grape flavored spring water. I don’t think I am going to bed any time soon and I was dealing with a little dry mouth so it was time for more water. I decided to go without the grape goop this time and just have boring plain water. I wanted to use a clean bottle though so that I didn’t get that little hint of flavoring left over from the last go-round.

I went out to the kitchen and opened up the cabinet to get a new water bottle. The first one I saw is the one I used to keep the distilled water in on parent sitting nights. I saw it there on the shelf and thought that I can’t drink out of that, it’s for the CPAP machine. Woah, wait a tick. I’m not parent sitting tonight. Sure, I am overly tired and my brain is starting to slip into autopilot, but that was weird. I was 100% positive that I could not use that particular bottle because it wasn’t for drinking.

In protest against the way that the parent sitting experience made me feel I took that bottle, filled it up with clear, clean Poland Springs water, and then chugged the fucker.

(Pause to check on work again. The two current utilities are still cranking along. Good good good)

On a totally unrelated note: I finished Saturday’s 30 minutes of exercise before work took off at about 11:00. Knowing that a lot of what I am doing tonight involves kicking off programs and then waiting for them to finish, and knowing that some of them would likely run for an hour or so, I decided to start Sunday’s exercise as soon after midnight as I could. I’m already up to 21 of my 30 minutes. When one of the two programs running completes I am going to kick off another one, and after I do that I am going to walk that last nine minutes. Well, some of it at least. It would be cool to have my 30 minutes in before the sun comes up. It would not be cool to make that a regular thing, but just this once? Groovy.