Morning Shift

So this is pretty much how my morning went:

  • Peter gets up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off at 6:00 am
  • Peter sits down to write a half-hour ahead off schedule
  • Peter finishes the 1,300 goal he set for his morning writing shift forty-five minutes early.
  • Peter wombles around the internet for ten minutes, then realise everyone else is asleep or on their way to work.
  • Peter gets bored.
  • Peter goes back to writing.

And that, folks, is why I’ve missed getting up early to get writing done. It wasn’t possible for much of the last year, courtesy of the apnea and my tendency to sleep through alarms, so I gradually cut back my morning writing to a bare minimum of getting up a half-hour early and getting a couple of hundred words done (and, even then, there were mornings it didn’t happen).

It’s nice to be back.

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Speaking of things coming back, tomorrow night will see the return of this:

Trashy Tuesdy Movie Banner

It’s been about two years since we last did a #TrashyTuesdayMovie, but my former flatmate lured me back by waving American Ninja Two around and saying, essentially, neener-neener-neener. Since American Ninja 1 was one of the most batshit crazy films we watched during the first run of films, I pretty much broke immediately and said yes, Tuesday night. Let’s do this. 

It may be a one off. It may come back regularly. I need to talk to The Flatmate and figure that out. But there’s something vaguely satisfying about knowing I can go out on a Tuesday evening and it won’t kill my productivity for the day.

Sleeping properly kind of rules, you know?

 

Apnea Update: CPAP Ho!

Sleep CyborgSo when I mentioned the sleep apnea thing back at the start of April, a whole bunch of folks were like “Get thee to a CPAP Machine.” To which I nodded sagely and said, well, yes, that’s on the list, we’re just waiting to see how bad things really are. 

Last week, I took twenty-four hours off work and did my first official sleep test to see how things were. I spent a couple of hours hooked up to electrodes and other stuff while I slept. It gathered data.

Turns out, things were pretty fucking bad. The diagnoses for chronic sleep apnea kicks in at around 30+ interruptions in sleep per hour. I was averaging 60-70 interruptions an hour, with a couple of periods where I’d stop breathing for up to a minute and a half at a time. When I start doing the math on that, my ongoing feeling of utter lethargy starts making all kinds of sense.

“We should probably get you on a CPAP trial, ASAP,” the nice lady from the sleep clinic said. Then we made an appointment Monday to start a one-month trial.

I’m not sure I remember what it feels like to be a fully-rested human being, but I’m hopeful I’ll get a reminder sometime in the next few weeks. Thanks, everyone, who weighted in with their advice and experiences.

Nostalgia

To borrow a line from L.P. Hartley: “The past is foreign country; they do things differently there.”

This line has been haunting me for most of the weekend, since I was down on the Gold Coast to man a booth at Supanova and it involved seeing parts of the Gold Coast I don’t often go to. While I frequently went down there to visit my parents over the last few years, it was relatively easy to ignore the vast bulk of the city while doing that – I barely had to get off the highway to reach their house, and there was never any call to go toward the beach where the bulk of the Gold Coast lives.
The Gold Coast Supanova, on the other hand, takes place in Broadbeach – right next to the Casino and Pacific Fair shopping mall, right across the road from the Broadbeach mall where I spent a lot of Friday and Saturday nights in my late teens and early twenties. It’s where one of the handful of game-stores on the Coast existed, so I went there a lot to buy copies of D&D and Vampire and, if I’m remembering correctly, one of the first attempts to create a Babylon 5 RPG.
Basically, it’s a part of the Gold Coast that’s loaded with memories, which is why it shows up in the Flotsam series so much.
It’s also a reminder that I don’t remember the past well.
I don’t forget things that happened, necessarily, but I’ll hit a place like Broadbeach and suddenly remembering periods of my life that seem like they happened to someone else. It’s lots of that time when we all went through our Goth phase and that time I was engaged, how the hell did that happen and that time I accidentally ended up doing theatre and all that time I spent at university, pretending I really wanted a PhD. 
Anything that happened more than decade ago just seems unreal to me, like I was just treading water while I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life.
And the memories bubble up, again and again, transmuted into fiction in one form or another.