• Tag Archives sleep

  • A Wednesday Ahead

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule                                                                              Stock Show Moon

    Kate’s got another all sew day, this one with the needle workers. They’ll be meeting, ironically, in the much higher and more expensive home of two hospital administrators. She has a brace on her recently surgically altered left thumb which may make this day a bit trying for her. Although, she pushes through that kind of obstacle. Just that kinda gal.

    My day will be Latin, review this time for Friday session with Greg, my Latin tutor.

    Work out, now during the day to get push all the water I drink further away from bedtime. Trying to get my sleep more routine. Some nights I sleep well, really well. Other nights, like last night, it’s a wrassling match.

    I plan to write a short essay, a prolegomena to Reimagining Faith. What is it? Why do I want to do it? What might it be? What are the elements available today that make it possible?

     

     


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Latin Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase 📎and tagged

  • 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

  • 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 at the crack of 11

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                          Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    Up at the crack of 11.  Kate and I went down to Pappy’s cafe for breakfast/brunch.  Pappy’s has a blue collar clientele and we got there just as the post church crowd came in, folks wearing suits for one time in the week, women with that fancy bag and new sweater, everyone looking serious and relieved at the same time, serious that they’d done their duty, relieved that its was over for another week.  Faith is a complex network of acts and activities, some metaphysical and some purely physical.  Dressing up and showing others you both know how and can afford to falls on the physical side.  It reinforces, though, the critical importance of Sunday, of Christianity or Judaism or Islam.  That reinforcement continues in prayer, reading of holy books, considering religious prescriptions and proscriptions.  What we would call a closed hermeneutical circle, meaningful and profound from within, suspect and thin seen from without.

    I’m about to head in for a nap, clear my thoughts with sleep.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality 📎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

  • The End of Days

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                           Waxing Harvest Moon

    The end of days.  No, not that one.  Just this one and the others.  The end of days is an important moment for me, a time of reflection.  Often, not always, but often, I will sit down and write, thinking as I do back over the day, the anxieties of which, as the New Testament said, were sufficient unto it.  So, here in the quiet, the gathering darkness headed toward the Solstice of Winter, I cast off those anxieties, trying to get to sleep.

    Most of the time, over the last few years anyway, getting to sleep has not been a problem for me.  Sometimes, rarely now, I’ll awaken and not be able to sleep.  I’ve learned that instead of railing against it, I just get up and read until I feel sleepy again.  Won’t be a problem tonight.  I hope.

    Most of the time sleep comes with difficulty when I’ve either been over stimulated during the day, an exciting debate or tour or new idea keeps kicking around even after bedtime; or, I’ve got an event upcoming in which I need to perform well.  Sometimes that causes me to lose sleep.  A speech, a tour of Chinese art for the Chinese Heritage Foundation, finishing a sermon.  Not often in either case, but they do happen.

    I love sleeping.  And dreaming.  Off and on over the years I’ve kept records of my dreams.  I like to do it on a regular basis, but it doesn’t hold my interest for long, in spite of my intense curiosity.  The dream time has given me many important insights.  Right now my body is telling me I need to go dream.  Good night.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dreams Health 📎and tagged

  • Gulf Streams Stops

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -3  44% 17% 1mph WSW bar30.24 rises windchill-5  Winter

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    The day continues cold.  We reached -15.8 this morning at 6:24AM.  Since then, we’ve gained about twelve degrees. The windchill all day has been brutal. 

    Kate finished cushions for the window seat in the kitchen.  I put Hilo on it while it was on Kate’s worktable to see if she would like it.  She seemed nervous.

    This week I’ve slept like a rock.  An odd phrase, but apt in the nothing till morning meaning I intend here.    

    Yesterday I finished Fifty Degrees, the second in Kim Stanley Robinson’s eco-thriller/near future sci-fi trilogy which begins with Forty Days of Rain and ends with Sixty Days and Counting. His Mars trilogy is better as science fiction; it’s wonderful; but, this trilogy strikes closer to home and imagines a time period when we pass some of the tipping points talked about in the news these days.  The Gulf Stream stops because the thermohaline barrier breaches.  Weather patterns swing wildly from one extreme to the other.  The West Anarctic Ice Shelf begins to leave land and drift into the ocean, causing several centimeters of sea level rise. 

    The book imagines a loose team of scientists, policy wonks and politicians who in their various spheres create solutions and fight to realize them before the worst becomes worse.  There is also some Buddhist material, too.  The characters are interesting and make the books worth reading, as was true of the Mars trilogy.  Robinson imagines, however, a science  triumphant, even dominant which I find suspicious.  It was industrialists and technocrats who got us in this mess, with our individual complicity, and to imagine that rationalism, their primary tool, will dig us out seems suspect at the core.

    The facet of it that rings true to me is the paradigmatically American approach of, keep trying until solutions come.  That the scientific will play a necessary and perhaps even lead role I don’t question.  I just don’t want an approach that leaves aside the many individual decision makers, those of us in our cars and at home with our dishwashers.  This is science-fiction, not political-fiction, or a novel of manners (though it has some aspects of this genre), so the focus is congruent, yet I want to see us stretch all the way out for solutions.


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Politics 📎and tagged