Family

Breathing is a good thing

Doc had a sleep study performed last week. He went to a sleep clinic, got hooked up to a bunch of equipment (“all my tubes and wires!”), and did his best to have a crappy night’s sleep, as is the norm for him. Turns out that he stops breathing an average of 34 times per hour. Also, he rarely enters REM sleep. So now he has this nifty machine called a CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) that gives him a constant stream of air that helps keep his nose and throat open while he sleeps. It’s pretty small and quiet (I can barely hear it) and he no longer snores. Wednesday morning I got out of the shower and found him awake, cleaning the bathroom sink, singing. Had they replaced my regular husband with Folger’s Crystals?! He remembered the dreams he’d had, which rarely happens, and he said he felt, and I quote, “pretty good,” which I don’t believe I have ever heard him say upon awakening. I have great expectations and high hopes for this treatment. I know it’s going to take a while for him to recover from years of exhaustion and sleep deprivation, but it’s looking good so far. And there’s no telling what kind of impact that it may have on other areas of his life. I text messaged him the other day with a CPAP smiley: :@)—[]

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welcome to the 1950s

I had a flat tire yesterday. My dad noticed it as he was taking some stuff out to their car — he and Mom were getting ready to drive back to Houston after spending Thanksgiving with us. My spare was also flat, so Dad drove me and the tire to Firestone to get a new one. I spoke to the guy behind the counter, showed him the paperwork from when I bought the tire only 2 years ago, took him out to Dad’s car to retrieve the flat tire, and stood with him while he determined whether it could to be fixed or if I’d need a new one. A few minutes later, he came back to give me the verdict… and he spoke directly to my father the entire time. My father, who up until now had been standing in the background. It’s not like this guy was old enough to have remembered a time before the women’s movement either.

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say ‘scuba’… it sounds funny!

Today, for the first time in my life, I breathed underwater. It was terrifying. I am taking scuba lessons, along with Doc, K1, and B, in preparation for our vacation in Belize in a few months. Sunny beaches, tropical drinks, lots of hot vacation sex, seafood, rainforests, hiking, snorkeling… and scuba diving. Belize is supposed to be one of the best diving spots in the world (fishies! coral reefs! crystal clear water! something called, dear god, “Blue Hole!”), and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’d probably end up regretting it if I go there and don’t know how to dive. Here’s the kicker: I’m scared to death to actually do it. I have always had regular nightmares about being trapped underwater, usually in swimming pools; sometimes when I can’t hold my breath any longer and am about to pass out, I breathe in water and I choke, and sometimes I can actually breathe underwater, which doesn’t make sense and also doesn’t make it any less scary. When I’m not dreaming, I usually do fine in swimming pools and the ocean, so I don’t have a water phobia or anything of that nature. After a lot of consideration, the thought of swimming with the fishes and coral reefs just slightly outweighed my completely unreasonable fear, so I told K1 that if she took lessons, so would I. B was kind enough to do all the research, and so now Doc and I each own a mask, snorkel, fins and wetsuit boots, know the names of all the equipment bits and pieces, and can use an incredibly complicated dive chart table thingy. We watched a 3 hour DVD and answered a whole bunch of quiz questions this past week (K1 and I both experienced heart-pounding apprehension […]

Read Moresay ‘scuba’… it sounds funny!

i’m sure this is exactly the plot of some movie…

Last night I dreamed that I lived in a little apartment in a New York style apartment building, in a row of nearly identical apartment buildings that was completely enclosed in a shell from the outside world. In the center of the neighborhood was an expanse of green space, a little park about the same footprint as an apartment building, and one end of it opened to a dock and the sea beyond, with a big industrial garage door that would open and close. Everyone was in a panic and in the process of evacuating because we had been invaded by aliens, although we never actually saw the aliens themselves and there was nowhere to evacuate to. They had landed on the rooftops of our buildings and were slowly taking over. Even though we couldn’t see them, we knew their paths because wherever they went, everything turned dark and crumbly and dead. Walls, plants, furniture. And people who’d been “infected” or whatever began to look like zombies, with tattered clothing and purple circles around their dark dead-looking eyes. I was one of the unofficial leaders trying to get the remaining people to safety, and I was lucky in that even though I was running around everywhere, through infected areas, I hadn’t been turned into a zombie yet. I wasn’t sure where we were going to take people anymore, because the park had been taken over by the aliens. I thought that maybe it was possible for us all to gather on the roofs, since the park wasn’t safe anymore and we had nowhere else to go, but then remembered that the roofs were probably where all the aliens were gathered. I noticed that Bob and someone else were up on the 3rd floor of one of the buildings, and they […]

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the week’s update

I’ve been working on my other website a lot this week so I haven’t had much time to write. Last week kinda sucked, between feeling downright awful for several days (bad period) and some crazy shit going on at work involving deadlines and last minute changes and having to say no and things maybe not working right and the possibility of a trivia slideshow to be presented in front of 2500 rich people going down in flames (it didn’t, but it was nervewracking getting there) and talking to managers about lessening the craziness of the crazy shit and just generally being extra crabby. It was a bad week for a lot of people that I talked to. Also, I barely ran any at all last week; my leg is still not feeling any better. Now it’s doing this thing where if I put any weight on it, it feels like it’s going to buckle! Good times all around. I’m going to try to get back into it this week, maybe run some on the elliptical machine, which I like better than the treadmill and it feels better on my injury. I got a slew of new freelance work and billed for quite a bit from September. I feel that the projects are coming at a good pace now. Nothing like the craziness of the book project. That should be printed and might deliver this week (thus the reason I was working on my business website; my URL is printed in the credits). We did have a good time out on Saturday night with Kirk, Brittney, and Stan. We ate at a steakhouse and then went to the crazy bowling alley-slash-event and entertainment center. We didn’t do any actual bowling, but played some video games, then went to Steak and Shake […]

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