• Tag Archives insomnia

  • Off the Plateau

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                             Cold Moon

    Bitter this morning.  -15.  Headed toward a high of 2.  Which we might reach and we might not.

    Awake for a couple of hours in the middle of the night.  It happens.  Not often.  This morning I kept turning over ideas for rewriting Missing, rewriting ideas spurred by my beta readers. I’m not ready to get started on that because I’ve got other readers yet to report in, but already the feedback has been very helpful.  Their thoughtfulness will make for a stronger book.

    This is a Latin day, a time with Greg.  I felt better translating this last chunk of Jason and Medea and the time with Greg confirmed that my skill level has begun to increase again.  I hit plateaus where I seem to slog along, not doing well, not doing poorly, then bump up to a different, higher capacity.  This was one of those days.  Feels good.

    This afternoon I plan to reorganize my images.  I’m on a two-week layoff from working out due to knee pain, most likely patella-femoral syndrome.  Best treatment?  Rest.  So, I’m resting.  I don’t like it; I’m very attached to regular workouts, but the long term is more important than the short term.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld Latin Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Reading

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                      Garden Planning Moon

    Not sure what wiped me out yesterday, but I sure felt crummy.  May be lack of sleep from reading too late into the night.  I don’t read much, fiction that is, during the day, just things for projects.  Art history, research for the novel, news, items for which I have either immediate use or that I consider part of my responsibility as a citizen to stay informed.

    After my workout, usually around 6:30 or 7:00 pm, I go upstairs, eat a light supper and then read.  This is time I used to watch TV.  Now you’d think that having a couple of hours to read that I hadn’t used before would make me happy with that and that I’d get to bed earlier than I had in the past.  Nope.

    When I read, I get hooked, stay in, read one more chapter, let myself get carried away by what John Gardner called the fictive dream.  I’ve done this all my life and had to stop reading in bed because it screwed up my getting to sleep.  Now I read in the living room, in a big leather chair.  And it screws up my getting to sleep.  Do you see a pattern here?

    My best guess is sleep deprivation, accumulated gradually, made me sick.  It used to.  All the time. When I was anxious, couldn’t sleep, had to go to work, drink lots of coffee to stay awake and alert, come home, be so wired that I couldn’t go to sleep and then the next day, repeat.  When I finally put this bad pattern to rest, I was, quite literally, a lot happier.

    Slept better last night and took a good nap this afternoon.  So, I felt better today.  Wrote my 1,500 words, studied Latin for two hours after the nap, worked out, now I’m ready for a steam bath and after that supper.  Then, more reading.


    📂This entry was posted in Humanities 📎and tagged

  • In the Garden

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                           New  Garlic Moon

    One of those nights last night, unable to get to sleep, still rolling around awake at 1:00 a.m.  Up a little bleary.  Wrote  few e-mails, then out in the orchard, first.  I’ve had tent caterpillars on two trees.  Each time I have removed the tent and stepped on it or crushed the worms.  This is non-chemical pest control, a route I prefer and, as long as I’m not running a commercial operation, one I can pursue.

    Now I wander in the orchard, looking at seed pods (fruit) beginning to develop from the last of the blossoms which dropped this week.  I’ll try to find worms and moths before they do 2011-05-17_0805early-spring-2011damage and as long as I can I’ll follow pinch and destroy.  After that, I think, right now anyway, that I’ll go with Gary Reuter, the bee rangler for Marla Spivak.  I’ll just put up with wormy apples.  This is partly out of regard for the bees who have enough pressure of them and they don’t need an added pesticide load from our orchard, but it’s more out of a commitment to no pesticides, grow strong plants and let them fend for themselves.  It’s worked reasonably well for me so far.

    (before the fall)

    After the orchard the potatoes were next.  Now that the soil has warmed up the potatoes have begun to grow, their dark lobe shaped leaves appearing atop a fragile looking stalk.  At this point the basics of potato culture involves mounding earth over the stalk as it grows.  That’s what I did today.  In the long raised bed where I have most of the potatoes this year, I also have a bumper crop of asiatic lilies and tulips.

    I planted this bed originally as a cutting garden, years ago.  The same fall the bed was built I went out to the Arboretum to a lily growers sale and bought Minnesota hardy bulbs.  They’ve been in that bed ever since, maybe 10 years.  Boy, have they enjoyed that bed.  They’ve started lilies all over the place.  That means that as I mound the potatoes I have to move around the lily bulbs that have generated.  I hate to just throw them away because they’re so hardy and have been with me so long.  I’m trying right now to raise vegetables and flowers in the same bed.  That’s also worked reasonably well for me.06-28-10_earlylilies

    I also mounded the leeks as my last action in the garden this morning.  In the case of leeks the mounding blanches the stalk, keeps it white underground and increases the usable part of the leek.

    That done, I’ve come inside to work on my Latin.  Pentheus, now, Book III:509-to the end.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Garden Great Work permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Awake. Damn it.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                            Waxing Bloodroot Moon

    Every once in a while.  Awake.  At 4 am.  After an hour of trying to go back to sleep, I’m still awake so I’m down here, making use of the wake time.  I’m going to write on Missing.

    This means, of course, that I’ll have to pick up the sleep later in the day.  Insomnia is an infrequent problem for me, though getting to sleep is sometimes difficult.  A large part of this is a habit, developed a long time ago, of using those quiet just before sleep minutes (hour) to ponder some philosophical or political or creative idea.  Not conducive too slumber, but very ingrained at this point.

    I do enjoy the night, its monastic silence and the feeling of being the only one awake, especially acute in our exurban cul de sac where lights don’t go on until 6 or 6:30.  There is, too, with a morning bout like this the opportunity to get a jump on the day, illusory as it is.

    So, Good Morning.  Now to that novel.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Writing 📎and tagged

  • Up Again

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                  Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    Here I am, at it again.  Don’t know why this damned tooth/jaw deal has interfered with my sleep this last two nights and not before, but there you are.

    Got pretty serious there on the post below, so I’ll try to stay a bit lighter here in the dark.

    Finished my Latin, english to Latin, yesterday, early, partly because I got up at 4 am or 5 or whatever.  Went back to bed at 9, got up at 11:30.  The whole day seemed off, sort of out of kilter.  Now I’m up again, an insomniac spurred on by the loss of wisdom.  Which, come to think of it, out to do it.

    As Kate comes closer and closer to retirement, January 7th is her date, I can sense a change, a sort of gathering in, nesting beginning.  I just ordered a few books on movies, for example, thinking we might use our Netflix account to watch movies together one night a week, a date but at home.  We’ve also gotten Kate’s quilt operation set up in a sewing room, upstairs, her long arm quilter, downstairs where her sewing room used to be and her piecing table cum storage in the spot we once had a pool table.

    We’ve spent a good bit of time, as I’m sure most do, on our retirement finances, a project not yet finished, with my pension numbers yet to come and Kate’s medicare part D, but we’ll finish before the end of December.

    Given the adequate, but tight fit of our budget in the coming years, we’ll probably travel less, a thought that at one time would have jarred me, but that now I find manageable.  Short trips to visit family, perhaps longer ones up north or down to Chicago, not quite so far away, so much money.  We’ll save up for a trip or two to somewhere interesting:  Churchill, Ontario, the Southwest, but cruises and foreign travel will be difficult.

    In the growing season, of course, we have the bees, the orchard, the vegetable gardens and the flower gardens that we care for together.  We’ll get into the city to the museums, theatre and music more than we have.

    Mostly, though, we’ll enjoy each others company and live not a good deal differently from what we do right now.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Family Health Retirement 📎and tagged