I've changed the title back to "I Don't Understand", now that it's available again. It's more appropriate (although "I Don't Approve!" might be even better).
(Note: The number in the post title is a sequence number, having nothing to do with contents.)
Prior to moving here, for the past nine years or so I had gone to bed after the evening news, somewhere between 11:30 pm and midnight, read or worked some puzzles or watched TV in bed, and fell asleep an hour or two later. I'd wake after 9 am, sometimes 10 if it had been a good book.
Here, I'm dragging by 9 pm, asleep by 11, and wide awake usually around 6:30 am. I don't use an alarm clock, but it's pretty much the same time every day. It's still dark out.
I didn't understand why. I am not a morning person, so it makes no sense.
Today I woke at 5:30 am to get some aspirin because I had a headache, and now I think I know why the early waking.
At the old house my neighbors were at some distance. Here they're right on top of me.
The guy across the street has a remote car starter. He starts the car at 5:40, and then it sits there running for 15 minutes, with the tail lights flashing red on my bedroom windows. And either it's just a deep-throated car, or he's got a muffler problem. He leaves a hair before 6.
Then at 6:15, the short school bus arrives to pick up my neighbor, who rides that bus to care for the kids who need assistance. The bus turns around in the driveway across the street, and it BEEP BEEP BEEPs when it backs up.
The birds are in full throat by then. There are a lot more birds here than at the old house. The old house was on a ridge above farmland to the west, where they grow corn, wheat, and several kinds of berries, and it's all woods around the house to the south, east, and north. The majority of the birds are in the woods or in the fields, away from the house.
Here, Daughter has two huge white pines in her front yard, with about 12 bird houses (some are bird apartments), there's a small lake behind my house, and at the end of the block there's the bay. Screaming seagulls, honking geese, chirping songbirds. Those damn things are LOUD!
So the idling car pulls me out of deep sleep, the beeping bus pulls me to awareness, and the birds don't let me fall back. By 6:30 I'm fully awake.
I figure the being so tired by 9 or 10 pm is due to early awakening, pollution, and boredom.
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. -- John F. Kennedy --
The folks on the video argue about how much, but nobody actually asks where the arsenic is coming from. Yeah, it occurs naturally in soil, but that's a minor source for fruit. The main pollutant is automobile exhaust, which is loaded with arsenic. Next time you drive past an orchard, rather than think "Oh, how pretty", you should wonder if you'll be drinking the juice from those apples, grown in soil loaded with settled exhaust arsenic, and bathed in arsenic-laden air.
There are lots of apple and peach orchards along the NYS Thruway. I'd heard once that fruit grown within x distance from major highways could not be used for human consumption. Fruit growing is not cheap. People don't tend orchards for fun. So the fruit goes somewhere. Where? Once it's picked, crated, sold, and shipped out, who knows where it was grown?
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I've been sleeping well the past few weeks, get up at about 3 am every night to piddle, but that's because I drink a lot of water before bed on purpose to keep it moving through the kidneys - I still have that stone and don't want any more, so I gotta keep a flow going. Not a problem. I do maybe three more words in the crossword puzzle, and fall asleep again.
The problem is that I've been waking every morning for the past two months with a killer headache. Sometimes it's the headache that wakes me. Mostly in the back of my head, but sometimes wrapping all around. I take some aspirin after I get up, and in a few hours it goes away.
It was scaring me badly, because I learned during Jay's battle with the tumor that a severe morning headache that goes away once you're upright can be a sign of swelling or edema in the brain, a buildup from being horizontal all night. Jay couldn't lie at less than a 30 degree angle because of that. Pressure from a tumor can cause it.
Ack. Scary thoughts.
I think I've figured it out.
I had bought a timer for the bedside lamp, which was nice, turns the light on at nightfall so the room is lighted when I go upstairs, and turns it off a bit after midnight, by which time I am always sound asleep. But I had to get rid of the damn thing because it was LOUD! It buzzed constantly. Very annoying.
Without a timer, I often (heck, almost always) fall asleep with the light on, doing puzzles or reading.
At the old house I had a tiny high intensity light that shown only on the page. I often slept with it on, no problems. Here I have a lamp on the table, with a tiny 25 watt bulb. There should be no problem. (The mere fact of light isn't a problem because I mostly sleep buried under the blanket where it's dark, anyway, so melatonin levels are likely close to normal.)
BUT, it's one of those new bulbs, the twisty ones.
I replaced it a few days ago with a small old-style incandescent bulb, and have awakened every morning since with no headache.
I think it's the twisty bulb!
Jay always had difficulty concentrating under florescent lights. He was one of those rare people who was aware of the strobe effect of florescents, even when they were working to specs. Is it possible that those curly bulbs strobe? Or something? And that's what was causing my headaches?
Are those twisty bulbs hurting us? Has anyone tested how they might make us ... something or other?
I REALLY want a timer that doesn't make noise!
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Candidates on the campaign trail often pay themselves a salary from the campaign funds. That's fine. Campaigning takes time away from one's prior occupation, and the mortgage still has to be paid.
But I heard something on the news a few days ago that annoyed me. I wrote it down on a slip of paper when I heard it (complete with source) and now naturally I can't find it, but it went something like this:
Newt Gingrich has taken paying himself a salary a step farther. He has rented his personal rolodex of contacts, potential contributors, to his campaign for $45,000 (Later- I found my note. It was $42,000).
What?!
I call that opportunistic raiding.
Sheesh. Go ahead, contribute.
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Speaking of raiding, we keep hearing that the US postal service is going broke, so they're going to have to close many rural post offices and stop Saturday deliveries.
Bull poopy.
The postal service runs at a profit every year. The problem is that Congress has been raiding the postal service, especially the retirement funds, which are classified as general funds, and hasn't been paying that money back. Now they're in a panic because they didn't leave enough there.
They did the same thing with Social Security. "Borrowed" with no intention of paying it back.
The state of New York has done the same thing with education funds. Back when they wanted a state lottery, it was sold to the voters with the promise that ALL proceeds would go to education.
Bull poopy.
That money goes into general funds, and is used for everything, including possibly education if they happen to think of it, but it's not exactly at the top of the priority list. They excuse it by saying that by increasing general funds, they increase the proportion that goes to education.
Yeah.
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Maybe this is one reason I haven't been blogging regularly lately. There's not much happening in my personal life, and everything I notice outside my life makes me angry.
Sleep - bad for several weeks. Disturbed by brain running in high gear. Fall asleep easily, but wake multiple times with cascading thoughts.
Headache - across lower back of head and neck. Often wake at very early hour and can't get back to sleep. One aspirin helps. Disappears when I'm upright. Neck creaks for a while when I move it after I get up. Headaches are very rare for me, so this is a worry.
Ribs - they hurt. Low, high, front, back, pain moves around. Definitely the ribs, not inside. About two or three weeks now. Also right hip, for about a month or more, moves around front, back, side, high, low.
Reasons? Heat blows on bed, on head, during night. Closed the vents completely last night, did sleep a little better. Still same bone pain, but headache less this morning. That mechanical tree frog sound from across the street disturbs me, causes tension in my neck. If things don't improve, try sleeping in a back bedroom. Can't hear it there. Bone pain - wondering if the kidney-protecting calcium reduction is causing it. I'm going to ignore doctor recommendations and add the magnesium back in. Maybe ribs hurt from leaning over the play yard sides? .
Anyone who inhabits himself cannot believe in objective thinking. -- Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself --
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I've been going to bed early pretty much ever since I've moved down here. I don't know why. I'm not watching TV much, lately I've had it on a total of maybe three to five hours a week, and that might be part of it. No reason to stay up late. Mainly I think it's because I've been waking up so early, so by 9 or 10 pm I'm tired.
I don't know why I'm waking up so early. There's a constant sound coming from the east, the side of the house my bedroom is on. It sounds like tree frogs, like shaking small chains, with a deeper undercurrent of machinery. I had noticed it during the winter, starting up in the evening and going until 2 or 3 am. Now, in the summer, it's constant. The really weird part is that no one else can hear it, even on my porch, only me, and I can't hear it anywhere else except in the front of my house and my yard. It's driving me crazy.
I woke this morning at 5 am and couldn't get back to sleep. I had set the A/C higher overnight (I don't know why, habit I guess, do the opposite with heat in the winter) and it was already 80 F in the bedroom when I woke. The birds were going crazy. When I got downstairs I turned the TV on for the news, and caught the numbers 100-105 F - today's prediction.
Good Grief! This is New Jersey! And I haven't felt humidity like this since I left St. Louis. Everything feels damp. Nothing dries. It's hard to breathe. (Nothing dries except the plants outside. The lawn, the tomato and pepper plants, the flowers. They scream constantly. The sun! The sun!)
When I wake in the morning, my mind is in high gear - fussing over the old house and the amount of work it's going to take to get out of there. There's just too much STUFF! I'm getting more and more willing to throw out perfectly good stuff, just to get it gone. And The Man. I wish I knew for sure what's going on there.
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Daughter and Hercules contribute to the loud bird problem. They bought their house from an elderly couple, and the old man in retirement built birdhouses. They have (I haven't counted, but it's something like) 15 birdhouses in the trees on their lot, and they are all occupied, with several varieties of birds and a few squirrels. The birds congregate there. Right across the street from my bedroom window. They start up just before the sun peeks over the horizon. Yeah, it's nice, but loud. .
I had a scare yesterday, Sunday. I went to the refrigerator yesterday morning for milk for my cereal, and found a storage container containing pork stuffed with bread, apples, celery, and raisins.
I recognized the storage container as the same set my daughter has, but I swear I had no idea where this one came from, or how long it had been there! Daughter and I had talked about stuffed beef rolls and stuffed pork chops a few days ago, recipies she'd remembered me making when she was small, and she'd loved them and wanted to know how to make them. I assumed this had come from her, because of the container, but I swear I don't recall her having given it to me. I had considered making stuffed chops myself and taking some over to her, but I didn't remember actually doing it.
I was floored. I know my memory is sometimes faulty, and for the past two weeks I've suspected the anesthesiologist in White Plains had given me Versed or something in the same family in spite of my having told him it causes me severe memory problems, because little things have been slipping the past few weeks, like anything that takes less than a few seconds I might not remember, but this is BIG! Whether I made it or Daughter gave it to me, it would have taken more than a few seconds, and I don't remember it!
It really scared me. I was afraid to mention it to Daughter, to ask, because she seems to think I'm pretty decrepit already.
Sunday afternoon she asked if I'd found the pork, and if I liked it. Found? Um, yeah, but how did it get there?
Mystery solved.
After my interrupted sleep Thursday night, utter dehydration, and severe IV trauma Friday followed by almost an hour of intense trembling (which is major muscle exercise!), I was completely wrung out on Saturday. I was cold and tired, and at about 7 pm I went upstairs and crawled into bed, still dressed. I just wanted to get warm in my soft fluffy nest, and maybe nap a little.
I fell asleep over a crossword puzzle and woke up at 3:30 am. Went downstairs, was surprised to find that the kitchen TV, lights, and computer were off (I had assumed I'd left them on), went outside for a cigarette, and then went back to bed. And fell asleep immediately again.
That's what I know.
What I didn't know:
Daughter had brought the pork over at 7:30 pm-ish Saturday. She rang the doorbell twice. When she got no answer, she tried the door. It was unlocked, so she came in. She knew I had to be home because of the unlocked door, my purse on the counter, Hal in the garage, and Fred in the driveway. She called me several times. She put the pork in the refrigerator, then went upstairs to look for me.
She found me in the bed with the light on, the covers up to my ears (so she didn't know I was fully dressed) and my face planted on the open crossword puzzle book. She said "Mommy? Are you ok?" a few times, but I was obviously comfortably asleep. She didn't want to startle me by touching me. So she went back to the kitchen, turned everything off, and left, locking the door behind her.
I can't believe I didn't hear the doorbell and didn't wake when she called or spoke to me. Seriously. That almost scares me. But I guess I really was completely worn out.
And I'm not quite as crazy as I was afraid I might be.
(The pork, once I knew it hadn't been sitting there for weeks, was delicious.) .
