Song: “I’m Running After You” by Major Hoople’s Boarding House
Mood: 6.5
Nightmares: 0
Ghosts: Lots
So I forgot to take my nighttime medication until around 11:30 last night. I figured that I’d be up for a couple of hours and then I’d head to bed when I started to feel them kicking in. No problem. It seems I crashed pretty quick. I don’t remember feeling tired. I don’t even remember when I woke up, but I was still sitting at the table, holding my head in my hands.
One of the weird things about the combination of medications I take at night (quetiapine, zopiclone, and prazosin) is that some nights I don’t notice it at all, while other nights it not only makes me tired, it also drains the strength right out of me. Some nights it’s so profound that I have to keep switching arms to brush my teeth because I can’t hold my toothbrush up. It’s usually not a problem because I should be asleep when it happens, but hoo boy I hope I don’t have to change a tire or move patio blocks in the middle of the night.
Regardless of how wet noodle-y my arms were last night, one great thing stands out – no nightmares! They seem to come in little clumps, but this last ‘clump’ was too long. Waking up from the same thing every night for the last two plus weeks was not fun in the least. Some of the other stuff is still bothering me (meditating and mindfulness exercises are out of the question for now), but it’s amazing how much better I feel in the morning when I haven’t woken up in the middle of the night, all freaked out and on the verge of panic. I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that I don’t have another nightmare for a long time – that would be fantastic!
I remember waking up twice because I was worried about stuff, but both times I was able to look at my phone and go back to sleep pretty quickly. So despite falling asleep at the dining room table and stumbling into bed at whenever o’clock, I woke up feeling more with it than I have in quite a while. I didn’t go back to bed, I didn’t zone out on the couch, and I was fairly productive today.
Ghosts were more of a problem today than yesterday but I had an idea that might help a couple of things. One of the big things I worry about is water leaking from somewhere – the hot water heater is a big problem for me but I’m concerned about everything from the hose to the washing machine to the toilet tank overflowing. I think I’m going to make some little battery-powered water detectors that’ll beep or something. I could put one at the big drain in the basement which would cover the whole house, or I could put a couple of them at known trouble spots. That might help, and it would be another project for my brain to think about. My only worry is that… no, wait – I have two. My two worries are that having a little herd of these things around the house might be kind of silly, and that it may end up becoming yet another layer of things for me to obsess about. How will I know they’re working? How often should I change the batteries… that sort of thing.
A better way would be to poll the detectors at specific intervals, but that introduces some kind of wireless communication, which takes more power and is more expensive… and then would I worry that the central device that’s doing the polling is working properly? I could set up two of them and have them poll each other, but now this whole thing is starting to resemble stuff that I set up at work, and going back to those kind of lengths is probably not a smart thing for me to do. Maybe I’ll ask Dr C about it at my next appointment.
Anyway, I spent more time chasing ghosts today than yesterday but I still made progress on several things. Toothbrush holder revision – check. Quilting diamond design and test print – check. Looking into how to finish PETG – check. Converting data types and playing with variables in Python – check. Writing about some of the things that make water so special – check. Investigating the dishwasher leak issue – check. Ordering more filament – check. Tidying the kitchen – check!
I was pretty productive today. I even fit in some more STO and J and I watched another episode of iZombie. I’m looking forward to what will hopefully be a sleep that’s nightmare-free, and another day of making progress on several things.
I hope you all have a refreshing, nightmare-free sleep too!
Stay safe.
🙂 someone once accused me of bringing 10000$ worth of tools to a minor inconvenience. 😉
And oo oooo special things about water. Well about everything. Do you ever ponder how many of your atoms have been part of dinosaurs?
Yeah, yeah… 🙂
Every once in a while I wonder about who or what previously used the stuff that I’m currently using. I am fully aware that a molecule of water can’t get “dirty”, but the idea that I might be drinking water that may have once been in trilobite urine is both fascinating and a little unsettling. For the same kind of reason, I like using the word “fertilizer” instead of the more specific “cow poo” when mixing it into the garden.