Happy Birthday, Tina!
Be sure to drop by her blog today and wish her a happy birthday.
Shaking
Evidently we had an earthquake in Portland on Sunday night, but nobody I know noticed. In fact, everybody here has forgotten because of the massive flooding that’s happening everywhere. I’m sure they’ll all forget about the flooding when the pestilence comes next week.
Top seven songs to play on the occasion of an earthquake:
- I Feel The Earth Move by Carole King
- Shake, Rattle and Roll by Bill Haley and the Comets
- Shaking by Eddie Money
- Shake It Up by The Cars
- Earthquake Weather by Beck
- Rumble by Link Wray
- And the Cradle Will Rock by Van Halen
Did I miss any?
When the rain comes
The rain has begun. It started about a week or two ago. After it starts, you lose all track of time of when it started and when it will end. Current forecasts have it clearing up sometime in June (that’s the old joke here). Some mornings when I get up I just can’t motivate myself to get on my bike clothes and voluntarily submit to a soaking. Most mornings, though, I can.
Saturday was another day of football. I dreaded spending five hours standing around in the wind, rain and cold, but only the rain showed up for the game. I discovered that my raincoat, which leaks a great deal when I’m on my bike, doesn’t leak at all when I’m standing around watching football. Other than the rain (and clouds), it was really quite nice out. The boys got to find out all about playing football in the mud. They both did really well again and had team pictures taken after their games.
Here comes the rain again
The last few mornings have been very nippy. I could even see my breath yesterday morning as I rode my bike up the hill to Burnside. Last night I put my winter cap on for the first time as well as my rain coat. This morning was my first ride with my “bike pants” – a pair of very old gray sweats. I keep forgetting to drop my winter gloves into my bike bag. Once I remember that, I’m sure the rain will start and won’t stop until next June.
Over the weekend Tina and I had pizza for the first time in many months. I also had a slice of birthday cake. I’ll see Thursday how that affects my weight loss.
For the last few nights I’ve been waking up to find my mask removed, but I have no memory of removing it. I’ve just been putting it back on and going back to sleep, but last night I couldn’t find the chin restraint anywhere, so I probably opened my mouth quite a bit. Perhaps I am demasking in my sleep.
Thomas’ Teacher
Thomas is in 5th grade this year. His teacher is really frustrating Tina and me. Last week, he assigned science homework to be done the next day, but there weren’t enough books for everyone in the class. In fact, there were only 7 books for 20 students. Thomas’ teacher made it the responsibility of the students to get together with other students after school to finish the homework. Luckily, Thomas coordinated with two students who live close to us. Unfortunately, Monday night is Cub Scout night and there was really no way we could get him to the friend’s house and then to Cub Scouts. So Tina retrieved the book on the way to Cub Scouts and copied the pertinent section on the school’s copy machine. Thomas was up 2 hours past his bedtime finishing his homework.
This is not the first time we’ve had problems with this teacher. Earlier in the year he assigned math homework to Thomas but failed to copy the necessary sections of the book. Thomas was the only one in the class who didn’t have the book. We offered to purchase the book for Thomas to use, but he declined and promised he would make sure Thomas had the material he needed in the future.
Sleep News
Friday morning I had an appointment with my sleep doctor. The week before I had the data downloaded from my CPAP machine and they forwarded the results to my doctor.
He congratulated on my flawless “compliance” results (machine said I used it every night, but I know I missed one night with a head cold) and explained how I was doing. Even though I’m still experiencing several hypopnea events per hour, they only comprise .3% of my total sleep time, which is very good. He also examined my nose and throat and found that the swelling of my adenoids has decreased. All good news. I see him again in six months.
Saturday afternoon, after the football games and lunch, I settled in for some TV on the couch and soon fell asleep. I slept for several hours and woke in the early evening in time for dinner. At dinner, I noted that my throat felt sore when I swallowed. This was not the first time I had noticed this after napping and realized that it was because of snoring. Snoring makes the adenoids “flap” in the breeze which makes them swell. When they swell, they flap even worse. It really illustrates how important it is for me to use the CPAP every night.
Fall Means Football
Yesterday I finally had the chance to attend a Saturday flag football double-header starring Thomas and Graham. The action started at around 10:30 in the morning on a perfect football day: brisk and sunny with the wind blowing very hard out of the east (as is normal for our position in The Gorge). So hard, in fact, that people’s chairs were being blown over and kids were chasing their lighter stuff all morning.
Graham’s game was first and resulted in a tie. This was the first time that they didn’t lose, so there was some improvement there. These little kids don’t understand most of the rules of football and do things like run the wrong way sometimes. Still, Graham is understanding the game much better and pulled his first three flags yesterday. He also returned the first kickoff the equivalent of about 60 yards on their shortened field. He really enjoyed himself, too, which is the important thing.
Thomas had practice almost immediately following Graham’s game and then a game after practice. Thomas is the biggest kid on his team and so gets to play on the line, in the middle on both offense and defense. I think he wishes that he could get his hands on the ball every once in awhile, so I tried to emphasize the importance of his position. At one point, the two big kids on the other team (who were both bigger than him) were double-teaming him to keep him from rushing. I explained to him how important this was but I’m not sure he understood. During the latter part of the game, though, he got two flags in a row and then took one to give the other team a big loss a short time later. He was very happy about that. And his team won big with three or four touchdowns to none over a team that had beaten them the previous week.
Here’s some oddities of flag football I found interesting:
- There are no fumbles. Once the ball hits the ground, the play is ruled dead.
- If the flag belt falls off the ball carrier, the game turns to tag football.
- For the younger kids, the coach joins his team in the back field to coach them up close.
- First downs happen at stationary points arranged every 20 yards on the field.
- Teams must declare which action they will take on fourth down. If they choose to punt, the defense is not allowed to rush the punter.
Hard drive blues
Thomas’ hard drive on his computer (my old Beige G3) went south quite awhile ago. I thought I had successfully copied everything from it last weekend onto another drive, but I couldn’t get his computer to boot with that drive. I thought there might be something wrong with that drive so this weekend I did some more drive swapping in order to get Thomas another drive. Here’s where things stood before I started:
- One 80 Gb drive in my computer is my startup drive
- One 80 Gb drive in my computer is a data-only (non-booting) drive
- One 30 Gb drive that was “laying around” that I had tried to make Thomas’ new drive but wouldn’t boot
- One 160 Gb new, unformatted drive
It’s really easy to swap drives in and out of my computer and it can hold up to four hard drives at a time. Because of that, I have been doing all the work there. One of the drive mounts is vertical and is held securely by a single screw. Almost every time I remove that screw, it falls between the hard drive and the mounting sled. Usually, I just turn the mounting sled upside down and the screw falls out. This time I forgot to do that and it evidently shorted out the hard drive circuit board next time I powered up. It took me a while to figure out what had happened since the only symptom was that my computer wouldn’t boot. When I realized what had happened, I switched focus back to installing Thomas’ new hard drive so that I could feel somewhat successful on the day. Alas, the same problem occurs there as the previous hard drive – the computer won’t recognize the drive as a boot drive. Failure there. After all my efforts, here’s what I had left:
- One 80 Gb unbootable and probably unreadable hard drive
- One 80 Gb drive with Thomas’ stuff on it that won’t boot in his computer
- One 30 Gb drive with Thomas’ stuff on it that won’t boot in his computer
- One 160 Gb drive presumably with my carbonite offer codes on it
- Two computers that won’t boot
I suppose there’s nothing wrong with the 30Gb drive so I’ll continue to work on getting that to work for Thomas. I’ve got a week-old backup that I can restore to the second 80Gb drive, but I really don’t have a drive I can boot with now. Perhaps I’ll boot with Thomas’ 30Gb in my computer until I can restore the 80.
Sometimes I really, really hate technology.
News
Thomas became interested in something called Pictochat Animation when he found some movies on YouTube that used the technique. Soon, he started drawing his own animations, which are essentially flip book animations that use the Pictochat feature on his Nintendo DS handheld game. He’s been working on an epic inspired by Star Wars, but it’s not ready quite yet. In the meantime, he commandeered my iSight and my computer to produce this animation in iMovie.
Tomorrow Thomas has two flag football games and Graham has one. Last week Thomas was sick, so we both missed his and Graham’s first games. Tomorrow I’ll miss them again since I’m helping Uncle Buddy move into his new house. Buddy is one of the rocks we have in Portland and we’d do anything for him, so I’m not too bothered to help.
Sleep update
The longer I use the CPAP and the wigkussen I got from slaapcity, the better my sleep seems to get. I’m no longer waking up because my mouth opens (as described earlier) and it isn’t waking Tina, either. So either it’s not happening or we’ve both grown used to it. I’m now sleeping all the way through the night and often wake up before my alarm. I haven’t been able to tell what time it is when that happens because it’s dark and I can’t really see the alarm on the other side of the bed with the mask on. However, I decided to just get up the other day when it happened and it was almost exactly seven hours after I had gone to bed. A few years ago I zeroed in on seven hours as the perfect amount of sleep – any more or less would make me feel tired. I think the fact that I’m waking up unassisted now after seven hours is an excellent sign that I’m returning to normal sleep patterns.
Take a look at these Mattress Sizes & Bed Size Dimensions I was looking up online to improve my good night sleep and back pain.
Next week I take the CPAP machine to the technician so she can read the results. It uses changes in air pressure and resistance to record a number of statistics. The week after, I have an appointment with my sleep doctor to discuss the CPAP stats and anything else I’d like to talk about, I am also going to see if I can start using the maternity pillow at night. It will be interesting to see how the machine’s log matches with the log that I started keeping when I began using the CPAP. The only complaint I have now is that my mouth is very dry when I wake but I doubt anything can be done about that.