Darkoshi

This article (it is brief - click to read the full text) emphasizes the importance of sleep (something I don't get enough up):

Sleep well — and reduce your risk of dementia and death (May 2021, Harvard.edu)

consistently sleeping six hours or less at age 50, 60, and 70 was associated with a 30% increase in dementia risk compared to a normal sleep duration of seven hours. The mean age of dementia diagnosis was 77 years.
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What's new here is that inadequate sleep in midlife raises one's risk of dementia. ... For example, if you're currently only sleeping four to five hours because you're up late working every night, you might want to change your habits, otherwise you risk developing dementia by the time you retire!
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By looking at individuals who were initially studied in midlife — some as young as age 50 — we now have greater certainty that poor sleep can increase one's risk of developing dementia 25 years or more in the future.
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When we sleep, however, brain cells and their connections actually shrink. This shrinking allows more space between the brain cells, so that beta amyloid and other substances that accumulate during the day can be flushed away.
So the theory is, if you don't get enough sleep, your brain won't have enough time to drain away beta amyloid and other substances. These substances then continue to accumulate, day after day, until they cause dementia.

I am soon going on a week's trip to California to visit my dad and stepmom. I haven't seen them in over 4 years. The last time I was in California was 2008. The last time I flew in a plane was 2015.

I'll need to be at the airport around 5:30am in the morning, which is around when I usually go to bed. I doubt I'll get much if any sleep that day. But hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep while flying. I bought a special travel pillow for that purpose. As rarely as I fly, I'd rather be looking out the window. But sleep is a necessity, so.

I've been quite stressed planning for the trip along with doing all my regular work. I have no plans for what I'll do once there, other than to probably be relieved to have made it. (I hope nothing goes wrong. Och. I shouldn't even be posting about it; it's like tempting fate)

It shows my age, but I'm still impressed by things like this. With the way other things are lately, I can only hope that cultural/social/legal acceptance continues to improve.

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This WebMd article has not only one, but two photos of masculine individuals in emotionally intimate poses: Things That Suppress Your Immune System
(Lack of sleep is the first thing listed.)

The first photo might depict two close platonic friends, one expressing caring concern for the other. The second photo is less ambiguous, unless it's two *very* close platonic friends.

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I gave my nieces this graphic novel for Christmas:
The Secret Garden on 81st Street

As it looked interesting, I read it myself first. To my pleasant surprise, a gay male couple were among the main characters. Surprising, as it wasn't mentioned on the back cover or inside jacket flaps. It's nice that gayness is treated as such a normal thing that it doesn't need to be mentioned, even in a young adult book. In the old days I'm sure that would have caused an uproar. (It probably does still in some circles, but whatever.)

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Of course, there are many other examples, including ads.

Here's a nice video, even though it's not my kind of music: Kalen Allen: Christmas Lives Within You, ft. Michaela Jaé Rodriguez

Ah, this one is more my style, though not as sentimental:



Video title: Santa Slay (Official Music Video)
Posted by: The Kalen Allen
Date posted: Dec 13, 2020

I've been trying to shift my sleep schedule and go to bed earlier. The first couple of nights, I did go to bed somewhat earlier and felt like I was on the right track. But since then I've been staying up later and later again.

I finally found a term for my problem; it is called sleep (or bedtime) procrastination.

One aspect of it is revenge bedtime procrastination, which I often have during the work week.

I don't usually have trouble falling asleep once I go to bed, so that is not the issue. Much of the advice one finds when searching is related to that, rather than in how to get yourself to go to bed in the first place.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3042679/how-to-break-your-sleep-procrastination-habit

https://solvingprocrastination.com/bedtime-procrastination/

Happy New Year, everyone.

New Year's Day had temps in the upper 70s here. So warm we left the windows open at night.
Today was wet and rainy. The rest of the week should be more typical winter weather.

My vacation is over. I did not manage to shift my internal clock back at all during that time.
Being accustomed to going to bed at 5am is not good, especially when I have meetings in the morning.

Christmas Eve was the one night I went to bed earlier, before 2am. There's something about that particular night of the year which makes my usual pastimes feel inappropriate. We celebrate on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. After the festivities and music, after the people and presents, after a month or more of small preparations and plans. It doesn't feel right to top all that off with my usual pastimes, as if it were any other day.

So I went to bed early (as I really was tired) but then I couldn't fall asleep*. An hour later I decided to get up, and stayed up again till 5:45am after all.

*Listening to and watching videos of big church bells before bed is a BAD idea. It hyped me up even more. The ringing and ringing and ringing of the bells. The swinging and swaying and clanging of the bells. The bells, the bells, the bells!

Note to self: Don't buy Kroger store-brand potato chips anymore. They're not salty enough. And two bags (both probably bought at the same time) had oil leaking out the seam like the seam hadn't been sealed shut well enough.

I'm considering going shopping tonight, even though it's already getting late. Because I'm out of corn chips, and snacks are getting scarce. I've been missing having cookies, though the stores don't have ones I much like, so going shopping won't really help with that. I ought to go back to my place and bake some chocolate chip cookies.

I've still got 3 carrots, a pear, and a bag of Food Lion potato chips (not opened yet, so their saltiness is unknown). Some cake and peanuts. Snack bars. Other nuts. Chocolate. It ought to be enough. I hate being out of corn chips though. I should just deal with it and eat all the other snacks up. Completely. I can live without corn chips. Heck, I've got a shaker of salt.

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I was at my mom's place for the rental bed delivery, since she had to be at work at that time. The mattress turned out to be one of those foam ones, a "bed in a box". Ashley Furniture brand. Both it and the bed-frame were definitely new items; that was very apparent from the packaging. I checked Amazon, and the same bed-frame is on sale there for $150, and the very same mattress for $439.

So the $150 which my mom is paying for the first month is about a quarter of the actual price, or maybe even more if the wholesale price is less than what Amazon sells it for. Still, it seems that if RentACenter allows it to be rented for a single month, that they'd still lose money on it? Unless they take advantage of a free-returns deal from the manufacturer.

Maybe RaC makes it hard to return items, requiring them to be in pristine condition. Maybe most people end up keeping the items for multiple months even if they didn't originally plan to (which I suspect might end up happening with my mom).

My mom didn't ask whether RaC will pick the items up for free, or if she'll have to pay for that. We certainly won't be able to fit it back into the box that it came in. For that matter, it won't even fit into the plastic cover it came in, due to mattress's foam expansion, so how could one cover it to keep it clean in transport? In the mattress encasement that I ordered, perhaps?

While browsing Amazon, I found that they even sell "bed in a box" mattresses with innersprings!

While at my mom's house, I wore my surgical face mask for a good 3 hours straight, and it didn't bother me much. Even though it was about 90 degrees in the house to begin with, and even with the A/C turned on, only got down to 87 by the time I left. It's good to know I can do that when necessary. Besides setting up the bed frame and mattress for her, I also fixed a problem with her printer. That turned out being a known issue with a Windows update, for which another special Windows update was required.

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There are several topics in this post for which none of my existing tags are very good matches.
Rentals. Mask-wearing. Mattresses.

Sometimes it takes me an hour of not being able to fall asleep, to realize it's because I'm feeling cold. In spite of the thick blankets, fleece sheets, and the electric blanket at my feet.

Now I got out of bed for a while and turned the heater up.

Yesterday morning, the heater wasn't working. Only the night before, I'd been reading and replying about someone else's thermostat problem. My problem wasn't due to the thermostat, though. The furnace was getting power and making the buzzy noise that meant it was starting up, but then would stop before the hot air started blowing.

I called the person who replaced the heater's control board 3 years ago when it last had a problem. His voicemail said he was unavailable til tomorrow, but forwarded me to someone else. Of all luck, they happened to be nearby getting supplies for another job, and were able to stop by in under an hour and easily fix it. Based on what I saw them do and what they told me, and what I looked up afterwards, there was some small debris that they cleared out from a tube, which had been causing the pressure switch not to close

The pressure switch is a safety mechanism that prevents the gas from being turned on and the flame from getting lit when the airflow isn't normal.

http://www.grayfurnaceman.com/gas-furnace-pressure-switch-problems.html

From looking at the documentation that came with the control board, its LEDs were actually flashing the error code for "Pressure Switch Open". I didn't realize it was an error code, because the flashing was steady, rather than a certain number of flashes followed by a pause. If there's ever a problem again, I need to remember to check those LEDs as one of the first troubleshooting steps.

I made a spur of the moment vlog video yesterday, as I was feeling in a rather chipper mood. I haven't done one like that in a very long time, and most of the people I've followed on YT don't make them anymore either. Maybe I was feeling nostalgic for the old days.

Words came out of my mouth rather easily, compared to usual.

The video, combined with another clip I decided to append to it, was over 15 minutes long. Too long, I knew (if I don't want to watch one that long, I don't expect other people would want to either...) but editing it to be shorter would have taken away the spontaneity of it.

Saving the video file took forever, and the resulting file was half a gig. So I reduced the resolution and data rate to make it smaller; saving that one took forever too. Then I uploaded it to YT, which also took forever. And THEN AFTER it finished uploading, YT gave me the message, "This video was removed because it was too long".

I thought, "Fuck it" (because I'd stayed up way too late doing the above), cried a bit, and went to sleep.

It would be better to split it into 2 separate videos anyway. But that YT message rubbed me the wrong way. I'll get around to uploading it again somewhere, someday. Maybe. So much for spontaneity.

I was so sleepy last night that I kept falling asleep while trying to write down notes about my day* on my laptop. Each time as I felt myself drifting into sleep, I started to hear sounds which coalesced into music or voices, someone saying something, etc. Instant dreams. Except that I woke up / pulled myself back from sleep before it went anywhere beyond those sounds.

*I've been writing daily notes to use for my own later reference, for the last few years. The notes are mainly lists of things I did, without any commentary of how I felt (as documenting the latter would take more effort and time, and generally doesn't even occur to me at the time that I'm writing the notes). Sometimes, maybe often, I still manage to miss writing down various semi-significant things that happened during the day. As I discovered today when I checked to see which recent day it was that we had a fire alarm at work.

On Wednesday, I was very sleepy and tired in the evening. I had come home early to mow the lawn before it got dark. After that, I trimmed some bushes and pulled some weeds before it got too dark to continue. Then I ate dinner and got back on my work laptop to finish up my 7 hours of work-work for the day. Finished around 11pm. I thought the tiredness was from the extra exertion of the yard work.

I got to bed at 1:10am, which is fairly early for me, and got 7 hours of sleep.

Thursday night, I didn't feel particularly tired. I stayed up til 2:40am and got 5.5 hours sleep.

(Our 8am Skype meetings for work are on a temporary hiatus, or I'd have gotten even less sleep.)

Last night (Friday), I was again very sleepy & tired in the evening. Of the sort where I have to fight to stay awake, and where I feel myself falling asleep for a split second and waking back up. I had already started feeling tired and slow around when I left work at 7pm, and then I still went grocery shopping. I got to bed by 1:40am, which is very early for me on the weekend. If I hadn't been wanting to get some things done, I'd have gone to bed before midnight.

Usually, even getting only 5 hours sleep the night before doesn't have such a strong effect on me. It'll make me tired in the morning, but not so much the next night. It seems odd to me to get that strong sleepy feeling twice in one week, yet on alternating days. Today, Saturday night, I was again not particularly tired, as you can see by the time of this post.