I have been pushing my wife to go to bed slightly earlier. Between that and both of is working out, I think we’ve been sleeping better.
My ‘natural’ cycle is to go to sleep around 10 and wake up around 6-7 these days. Of course, with a dog there’s a cap on how long we can sleep in ever.
I’m a night-owl, and happiest when the rest of the world is asleep. Having to head off to sleep at 11pm feels wrong somehow.
This is so me. Unfortunately I start work at 8 AM.
Two kids (3yo and a 6mo) means my sleep schedule is crazy. Frequent naps at around 2pm-3pm for my 3yo (which I have to take with him since he can’t nap on his own yet), then bed time for everyone is around 11pm although sleep isn’t achieved all the way until 2am usually. It’s an improvement; Just last month, I usually slept at 3am because I’m holding the baby so my wife can get a couple hours in before having to get up to deal with said baby.
Welcome back, good to hear all is well your side!
Good to be back and it’s nice to see many of us are still around. Life and work kept me busy, but all for the better. I got promoted to Sys Admin just before the COVID-19 lockdowns happened here in the Bay Area, which helped out a ton with my second son being born in August last year. I’ve been doing less user-facing support so I haven’t had much of a need to vent about stupidity lately.
When I was first doing IT I was on a second-shift schedule, and my wife volunteered for late hours at her work, too, so we didn’t have to get up at a certain time, really.
I found I slept 7.5 hours, pretty much independent of when I went to bed.
I will say that awakening at the same time every day is easier if you also go to bed at the same time every day, providing there are enough hours between the two. 
Yeah. Working nights can mess with your schedule. I didn’t have the luxury of my wife shifting hers so we basically made-do. I used the hall bath to brush my teeth and dress for bed so I didn’t have to wake her with the lights and I know I woke up all the time in the AM.
It took me months to recover after a couple years of ‘evening’ shift.
By now, you likely heard that Bruce Willis has retired from acting because he’s been diagnosed with aphasia. There’s no information I can find on what caused it, whether from a stroke or head trauma.
What’s coming out more is how a lot of people could see there was something just off with him and they were finding ways to work around it. This article from the Los Angeles Times has a lot of those ways: concerns about memory loss, rewriting scripts to give him less lines and/or making them shorter so it wouldn’t be a lengthy piece he’d have to recite, not really understanding why he was on set, and having it in his contract that he’d work no more than two days, max of eight hours each day, but productions were often encouraged to have him finish in half that, or he’d just get done in that amount of time.
Some was done to be kind. “How do we not make Bruce look bad?” Or statements like he was fine or even better than before. If I’m reading the article right, there may have been some self-interest by some of the people around him to keep him working. Twenty-two films in the last four years, many being low-budget films that could use a boost by a name-brand actor like him.
The Razzie Awards rescinded the one they gave Bruce this year after creating a special category just for him. Kevin Smith is reevaluating the experience he had with Bruce while making Cop Out back in 2010. It will be interesting to see if JoBlo Originals does a follow-up to their “WTF Happened to BRUCE WILLIS?” video.
This is something I have no personal frame of reference for. Not being able to comprehend what you are seeing or hearing because the translation within your brain of audio-visual into meaning isn’t working, and the reverse of you know what you want to say but you’re unable to do it.
Willis will forever be remembered for his “yippee-ki-yay” line.
For his sake I do hope it can be reversed. It must not be fun 
I needed another set of reading glasses. Decided to get the next step up in magnification. Doesn’t change the focus significantly, but it’s not enough to read really small print. Trying to read through a magnifying glass is weird, both with and without the reading glasses. Closing one eye seems to make it work better.
I’m definitely getting old.
I started needing bifocals/progressives/second set of glasses almost 20 years ago. Ended up with two sets because progressives don’t work well for computer work. Been OK since, and using my distance glasses with my phone/laptop hasn’t been much of a problem.
Until the past couple months. Now I realize I need to go back to progressives so I can read my watch and other smaller/up close devices.
Sight’s also dropping out, along with other things.
Still I am mobile and healthy, and that’s still cause for celebration.
I need to go get my blood pressure taken. I’ve been feeling like I’m going to pass out sometimes. I’ve lost enough weight and I’ve been active enough that maybe it’s time to wean myself off of the blood pressure meds.
I don’t have health insurance right now, so I can’t go to the doctor. Next month I should have coverage.
Last week at the dentist my BP was 114/60, quite a bit lower than the not-terrible 122/76 in August when last I donated blood. And that’s after half a pot of coffee, which beverage I am now quite convinced is the only thing keeping my heart beating.
Irrationally excited to go to the optometrist this week and get a new prescription. I very much need reading/computer glasses.
I don’t think I mentioned that I changed one of my medications and it has made a ton of difference in basically everything.
I switched my diabetes medication to something called Forxiga (dapagloflozin). It’s one tiny pill instead of 2 huge ones. They say that one of the side effects is weight loss, but I don’t know. Yes, I lost 15 pounds, but I think that’s weight that I’d put on with the other drug. Now, I’m back down to what I remember my ‘regular’ weight was before. My blood pressure and pulse are back in the normal range (125/78) and I don’t hear my heart beating in my ears when I’m trying to get to sleep.
Something weird happened the last time I went to donate blood and I’m not convinced that it has anything to do with the new medication, but it happened around the same time.
I was refused because my iron was low. That happens to me once in a while. I’m a regular donor and my family has a history of iron deficiency. I was due to have a blood test from my doctor, so I surreptitiously added a check to the requisition to have my feratin checked. A couple of days later, she called me and said that I had to see her right away. For men, the normal range is 24 to 336 micrograms/liter. That’s quite a range. Mine was 8. She told me to get the over-the-counter iron supplement and take them once/day. I’ve started feeling like I have some more energy lately, and I can’t wait to stop taking these little green pills. Some say they’re hard on your stomach, though I’ve never had any problem. What bugs me is that I can smell what the pill tastes like all the time, like it’s coming out of my pores. It isn’t awful, almost a chocolatey smell. It still bugs me. Now that I’m moved and almost done the treatment, I should go give blood again to see what they say.
During the last year, Willis was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. The symptoms of communication problems led to the previous diagnosis of aphrasia.
JoBlo Originals did make a follow-up: “Thank You, Bruce Willis”.
Fireworks when you’re a kid: loud, colorful, fun.
Fireworks when you’re an adult: very often a source of not being able to get a good night’s sleep.
Every morning at 5am for the last 3 days.
I guess someone didn’t get to set theirs off due to rain or something (Canada Day is July 1st)?
Still, it was pissing down this morning when they went off.
I have the day off tomorrow, so I might just set an alarm and get out there before they do with a camera and an air horn.
Part of getting old is that illnesses can hit you harder than they did before. Choosing what to take for them makes more of a difference than we knew.
Cold medicines don’t seem to do much for me. I always chalked that up to the fact that you never get the exact same cold because your body develops immunities each time. I’d just buy a different brand and hope whatever the formula of medicines in it would be different enough to handle the current bug.
The cause of the medicines not working well can be from how much phenylephrine is in them. Though concerns about how well it worked can be traced back to 1994, the FDA ruled last month the decongestant works about the same as a placebo when taken orally. By going through the stomach first, only 40% makes its way into the bloodstream.
Cold medicines used to have pseudoephedrine as a decongestant, which allows for about 100% to reach the bloodstream, but that became limited in 2006 because it caused insomnia and could be used to make meth. There’s a story on NotAlwaysRight.com about a person looking for a particular medicine and let slip “the recipe says”. (The link for the site goes to the main page, not that story)
CVS started pulling medicines from their shelves when phenylephrine is the only active ingredient. Products with more than one active ingredient will still be sold even if they have phenylephrine. I don’t know what other stores are doing. Some brands will label the product as “PE” if it has it.
I had put the empty box of what I bought last time in a spot as a reminder to buy another kind before I need it this winter.
Acetaminophen is listed as the active ingredient for pain relief and fever reduction. That’s Tylenol. Next is Dextromethorphan HBr for coughs. The nighttime pill has Doxylamine succinate for an antihistamine, but the daytime pill has Phenylephrine HCI for decongestant. I guess that means PE is the only active ingredient in this one for that part and I should look at a different one when I restock. And remember to bring my glasses into the store so I can read the small print. 