Six Dollars?

Went to Carl's Jr. for a Six Dollar Burger, guess how much it cost?

Seven Dollars.

Severe Sleep Apnea

Back in March when I was diagnosed with diabetes, I figured it was important that I get any of my other health issues resolved, because I meant to lose weight and get things under control so that I didn't wind up like the average person for whom diabetes shortens the length of their life by 20 years.

One of those issues that I thought I'd better check on was sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a condition where your throat relaxes too much while you are asleep, closing off your airway. Your body will then wake up, because you are suffocating, and your airway opens back up. Then go you back to sleep, and your airway closes off again, and everything repeats. Waking up dozens upon dozens of times throughout the night makes for a less than restful night of sleep. Getting no rest from your sleep makes for all sorts of other problems.

My father has sleep apnea, and some of my brothers do as well. My wife has always complained of my snoring...heck, My older brother complained of my snoring back before I was even in high school. So, yeah, I snore. That's one of the signs that you might have sleep apnea, and there are others as well. Being overweight, which I also am, is another one. Having diabetes is also another one...or maybe it goes the other way, having sleep apnea means you will end up with diabetes. Not sure about the chain of cause and effect on that one.

Anyway, I talked to my doctor about it, and he recommended that I try a simple test to see if it's likely necessary for me to go as far as doing a sleep study. He referred me to a place that called me up, and brought me out an oximeter to sleep the night with. This is just a little clip that you wear over your fingertip that checks the oxygen level of your blood somehow...don't ask me how, I have no idea how that works. After the oximeter results came in, my doctor said it was worth it for me to get the full-blown sleep study. So, he referred me to an actual sleep specialist.

They sent me home with an oximeter, plus several other things, like a strap that went across my chest and measured some stuff...I don't know, maybe whether my chest was expanding and contracting to know if I was breathing or not....also a tube that I had to tape right under my nose that would feel if breath was coming in and out of it.

It was kind of hard to sleep with the oximeter on my finger for that first test, but this one, with all this stuff on top of the oximeter, was much more difficult. I managed, however, and when the results came in, the sleep specialist told me I didn't just have sleep apnea, but extreme sleep apnea. When I slept on my side, I only stopped breathing about seven times an hour, but on my back, I stopped breathing around 105 times an hour. That's twice a minute, and I spent three hours of the night on my back, falling asleep, closing off my breathing tube, gasping awake, and repeating, over and over and over again.

So, they set me up with a CPAP machine. (No, those are both P's, and yes, I did have fun taking a pen off the desk and altering one of flyers at the sleep center to say, "Having issues with your CRAP?") CPAP stands for continuous positive airway pressure. What it does is push air into your throat while you are asleep that creates enough pressure to hold your throat in place. It can't close off your airway when you relax, because the air pressure keeps it where it belongs.

I was afraid it was going to be loud and obnoxious, and I would never hear the end of the complaints from my light-sleeper of a wife, but it's not that at all. In fact, my wife has had nothing but praise for it, because I don't snore anymore. Shoot, even my daughter, who sleeps way down the hall with her door closed has remarked on the fact that I don't snore...so, that gives you a little bit of insight into how bad my snoring was.

It can be a bit of a pain. I have to attach it to my face with some straps, and it goes over my nose like this:

And I thought the sleep test stuff was annoying to sleep with. But I've been wearing it for a little over a week now, and I'm getting used to it. Sometimes there's issues with it coming off in the night, and it's much harder to sleep on my side with it. All in all, though, it's been a big improvement. Hopefully, by getting all this amazing, uninterrupted sleep, I'll have all sorts of energy to do things like exercise and eat right, and get my body in shape so that the diabetes doesn't bring my life to an early finish.

Thanks For The Suggestion

I think I need to start listening to Pandora more often. I only use it here and there, but whenever I do, I find out about another artist that I'd never heard about before, but I love.

Today's find, Caro Emerald. "Liquid Lunch" played on the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy channel that my son set up, and I was instantly in love.

Now I'm going through all the songs by her that I can find. This one is an early favorite.

Sunglasses Are Cool, Right?

Like, I mean, these Dollar Store sunglasses make me cool, right?

Something's gotta do it, right? I mean...it is possible, right?

The Suicide Solution

Despite hearing bad things about it, Rish and I went to see the new Suicide Squad movie.

How did it go? What did we think? Did we agree with the haters? Follow the link to the That Gets My Goat post, or right click here to download. Then again, you could just take the easy out...and click the play button below.

Some Classic Lit

My son told me that he has a required class in high school this year called Financial Literature.

Uh, what?

I couldn't wrap my head around that. It just didn't computer. What literature is there that's financial in nature? What do they read? Dave Ramsey?

Then I finally realized what the kid must have actually meant. He didn't have a financial literature class, it was a financial literacy class.

"Oh, well, they abbreviate it the same way," my son said.

He might need a different kind of literacy class.

Sound The Bell

First day of school, and I'm back to getting up before dawn. Blech.

Here's the first day of school sunrise for you. 

I guess getting to see that is the one perk of getting up this early.

Zombies On The Dunesteef

New episode of the Dunesteef up. It's a Munsi joint called "I, Zombie."

It's pretty good stuff. You should definitely check it out. It's a pretty darn good zombie tale that you'll love. You can follow the link over to the Dunesteef page, right click to download it here, or just hit the play button below and listen right where you are.

Self-destructing

They put out a trailer for the new Metallica album today.

Should I be excited or filled with dread? Let's hope it's nothing like that Lou Reed one.

It says something pretty sad when your favorite band releasing a new album makes you worry more than exult.

Older Or Younger?

I always like to quote the They Might Be Giants song "Older" each time I have a birthday...and sometimes on other people's birthdays too, because it's delightfully pessimistic and dour. "You're older than you've ever been...and now you're even older." It's funny.

But I just realized while listening to Regina Spektor's "Small Town Moon" that there's a song out there that takes the exact same pessimistic idea and turns it onto its head and fills it with optimism. Not usually my thing, but it kind of resonated. She says, "Today we're younger than we're ever going to be." In other words, now is the time. It'll never be better than now. Go forth and conquer, folks.

Prettying Up The Parsecs

I added Phoenix to my Parsec display on my shelf.

I still want to find a Wolverine to go in the middle, then I guess I'll be done...unless we win another. At least that won't possibly happen this year since we didn't turn in our entry on time.

My Eyes!

When Rish and I went to Suicide Squad yesterday, we came across the most disturbing thing. It's probably best if you just look away...

Sunflowers 2016

I love sunflowers...other flowers too, but mostly sunflowers. Every year, I do a post about the flowers we managed to grow in our yard, like this one from last year. This year, however, I had an even bigger plan.

The yard next door to us has been a vacant lot since we first moved in three years ago. Each summer, it fills with tons and tons of tall, spiny weeds. Not only that, the weeds, having a nice safe base to mount an attack from, invade our garden by the thousands. So, my plan this year was to outbreed the weeds. I was going to shoulder them out of the area, by planting giant sunflowers that would out-compete them for the resources. Then, we'd have an empty lot full of gorgeous flowers instead of thorny weeds, and we wouldn't have to spend so much time pulling weeds from our own garden.

I harvested as many seeds from our sunflowers that we grew last year as I could. I had several lunch bags full of them by the time fall ended. I was prepared to really go after that lot come spring. I even went over and spread some of the seeds that I had early, hoping that they'd winter well, and sprout in the spring. But, things didn't go as I'd planned.

The empty lot next door isn't so empty anymore. Instead, they finally got around to building a house there. So, all sorts of trucks, bulldozers, and backhoes drove over my little seeds. My visions of a field of flowers dissipated, but the funny thing is, the sunflowers refused to be defeated so completely. Look here, sprouting out of the dirt in the backyard:

And also, here in the front of the house is a nice big tall one:

The bulldozers didn't win every fight.

It'll actually be kind of nice to have a house next door instead of an open field. I think it'll surely cut down on the weeds a lot. But what do I do with the bags and bags of sunflower seeds I saved from last year? I guess I could go find another open area of land and plant them there. Maybe I'll try that.

Oh, one other thing. We also got these sunflowers:

Two years in a row now, the birds that eat from our bird feeder have managed to plant and grow sunflowers for us just by being messy with the bird seed. Aren't they pretty?

Camping With Daddy, Part II: Dinosaur

I had so many plans for camping trips this summer, but a lot of them had to be shelved when August arrived and turned out not to be as accommodating as I'd hoped. I started having to work a lot of weekends to fill in for other people who were taking their vacation now. It's only fair, I suppose, since I'd had my turn taking time off, but I had wanted to use my weekends for some short camping trips.

I had promised the kids one last trip before the school year began, and it looked like this had to be the week. I checked the weather report for several of my preferred destinations--Capitol Reef National Park, Great Basin National Park, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, or Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. A good storm must be coming in this weekend, because every single one of them had rain forecasted.

Then I found it, Dinosaur National Monument was looking clear. So, I got us ready. It was going to be another trip with Daddy, like the one we took to Black Canyon of the Gunnison, only a little shorter this time. My wife had to work again, so she couldn't come. I put together my specialty meals: peanut butter sandwiches, hot dogs, and cereal. Then we packed up the car, and early Saturday afternoon, we headed out.

The weather was horrible the entire way. It was looking like it was going to be a repeat of our last camping with Daddy adventure. It poured rain so hard that I could barely see out my front window most of the way. My wipers were working overtime just so I could see the road ahead of me. Needless to say, I was frustrated. I didn't really want to camp in the rain.

We outpaced the storm, however, right before we got to the park. It cleared up for just a bit, but we could tell it was headed in our direction, and soon in would be back on top of us.

We stopped at the visitor center for a short moment, just to ask about what was the best way to see the park, then we hurried to the campground, so that we could get our tent set up before the rain hit.

It was quite a struggle, because the wind was treating our tent like the sail on a boat. It took all our strength to keep it from blowing away before we got it staked down. And the rain was starting to come. It wasn't much yet, just some sprinkles, but things weren't looking good. Eventually, we got everything squared away, and were ready to go see the sights.

The rain never really materialized. It only sprinkled a little, then quit. So, we had one thing to be happy about. Maybe it would all blow away, and we would be allowed to enjoy things in dry clothes. Instead of having to dash from the car to the viewpoint and back again as quick as we could. Maybe we might even be able to do some real hiking.

We went back to the visitor center to take the shuttle bus up to the dinosaur quarry, only to discover that the last bus of the day had already finished its run. We were going to have to wait to see dinosaurs until the next morning.

Little  loved the dinosaur statue out front of the visitors center, and did his very best to reach over from beyond the fence and touch it. He named the dinosaur Happy, and talked about him constantly throughout the trip.

Instead of going to the quarry, we drove along the Cub Creek Road. There were supposed to be a bunch of pictographs left here by the ancient Puebloan people. I was pretty excited to see these. There's tons of places in the mountain west that have them, but this would be my first time laying eyes on any.

They didn't disappoint. They were really interesting pictures.

It made me wish that I'd done some research before coming to visit so that I'd have some information about the pictographs to tell the kids. I needed a tour guide or something.

More than I knew, it turned out. All along the road, there were several spots of interest. Each spot was marked with a sign that had a picture of a pictograph on it. Only some of these places were the sites of pictographs, however. The others had some other significance to them, but I didn't know what it was. I just assumed they all were pictographs, so the next time we saw a sign, we stopped the car, got out, and wandered around looking for a place that pictographs might be hiding.

Eventually, consulting our map, we came to realize that there were no more pictographs until we were a long ways further down the road. We got back in the car, and finally found them.

They were really amazing. The idea of a drawing that I'd made lasting for more than a thousand years is crazy, but that's exactly what these are.

What will remain of me in a thousand years? I suppose our future ancestors...er, progeny? Is that what you call them?...will certainly be reading these blog posts and marveling at what life was like in 2016.

Nah, I'm lucky to get anybody to read these now-a-days. No one's ever going to look back at these even one year from now, much less one thousand.

At the very far end of the road was the Josie Morris cabin.

Not nearly as ancient as the petroglyphs, Josie's cabin was inhabited by a woman who settled in the area in 1914. She lived there for fifty years, and then after she died, they decided to incorporate her frontier cabin into the monument.

It's a nice place. There's lots of big, shady trees, a natural spring running right through the property, and nice wide meadow, as well as the main cabin. 

I thought it was pretty funny when we first got there, I was reading the sign that is posted right next to the spot where the spring burbles out of the ground. It said that it was likely that there was giardia in the water. When I loudly read the final words on the sign, "Protect yourself. Don't drink the water." I noticed my daughter's head snap up, and her eyes widen in alarm.

"You're not supposed to drink the water?" she asked.

"Nope," I said. "I'm guessing from your expression that you already did, though?"

She looked down, embarrassed.

"Well, it's too late now. I guess we just hope that you didn't get any giardia. If you have any problems, let me know, so we can get you to the doctor." I had to explain to her what giardia was, and she was none too pleased. Turns out she was fine. Solid as a rock, yeah.

After the cabin, it was time to head back to camp and make some dinner. A Daddy special, hot dogs and chips. Oh yeah, and a salad for our vegetarian.

The kids love it...or at least they tolerate it. Actually, my wife told me that they're not really fans, but who wants to spend a whole ton of time planning out and then cooking big special meals while camping? There's much higher priorities when camping.

Once we finished with dinner, we packed everything away until breakfast time, and then got back in the car. That's right, we weren't done yet. It was time for the thing I was most excited about, and the thing I was also the most worried about.

A lot of the national parks and monuments here are located in some of the most remote areas of the country. There's been a movement going on for the last several years to create places where you can actually see the stars. The International Dark Sky Association certifies places as Dark Sky Parks. All they have to do is change a few things to make the grade, like shielding their lights so that they only shine downwards. Dinosaur National Monument isn't an official Dark Sky Park, but Utah lists it as a Sanctuary of Natural Darkness whatever that means.

The coolest thing about all of this is that they have ranger programs at these dark sky places that are all about seeing the stars that you wouldn't normally be able to see. Before we left home, I found out on the internet that there would be a ranger program on the night that we would be camping there, and I was so excited to attend. Not only were they going to give you a sort of guided tour of the night sky, but there would also be several large telescopes there so that we could get a good look at things like Saturn and Mars.

However, there wouldn't be much of a program if it was raining, or even if the sky was just cloudy. So, as we drove toward Dinosaur, I was filled with a deeper anger and regret with each drop of rain that fell on my windshield. The rain went away, though. But that wasn't enough. The clouds had to go as well. I asked them at the visitor center, and they said there would be a ranger program even if there were clouds, there just wouldn't be any star gazing involved. I was not particularly interested in a star gazing party without star gazing. I wanted those clouds to go away.

And, miracle of miracles, they actually did all blow away, and as night fell, the stars began peeking out everywhere. We went to the program, and this photo was the best one I could get:

Yeah, it kind of leaves a lot to the imagination. I'm really itching to get a camera that has the option of leaving the shutter open for a longer period of time, but right now, I got nothing that can capture a picture of the stars. But it looked something like this picture that I found on the internet:

Seriously, it was amazing. It was my favorite part of the trip, and possibly my favorite thing that we've ever done at any national park or monument in all of our trips ever. I've always been a sci-fi space geek. I've always loved the idea of seeing and experiencing other worlds, stars, galaxies, and universes. When it comes down to it, this is the only way we can do so here on earth. Unless you're an astronaut, gazing at the stars and looking through telescopes is how we experience space.

It gives a new meaning to national parks, when you figure that they also include the whole universe of stars as well, but it's true. There's nowhere that you can see them better around here. They have a series of postcards for all the different parks out there, and my daughter has been collecting a lot of them. The phrase that they use is, "Half the Park Is After Dark," and it couldn't be more true.

Okay, well, that's enough of using other people's pictures for now, I guess. The stars were awesome, we saw Saturn, Mars, and the Andromeda Galaxy through telescopes, and then we went back to camp and went to bed.

That night, our air mattresses didn't stay pumped for us. It was really uncomfortable, and I was ready to get up pretty early, because it was better than laying there with my hips being jabbed by rocks and stuff. It's pretty upsetting, because the mattresses have been very reliable up until now, but this time two of the three went flat on us. I wonder what we did to cause it?

I went out and walked around, and saw tons of rabbits hanging out in the campground, just like the last time I took the kids camping and we went to the Colorado National Monument.

While the kids snoozed, I took some pictures of flowers, like always. This is the Rocky Mountain Bee Plant, which was all over the place in Dinosaur.

I rousted the kids out of bed, we had some breakfast, then went down to the river, which was right next to the campground, and we fished for a little while. I don't know why I bothered at all. It was as fruitless as any other attempt we've ever made at catching fish. 

We probably came to the river too late; the kids slept in too much since they were up late looking at stars. It's like that saying "You can't soar with the eagles at dawn when you were hooting with the owls all night". But which is more fun, hooting or soaring? I suppose it depends on each person. I personally love stargazing a lot more than fishing, so I wasn't upset at all...well, I mean, I was upset with having to endlessly try to fix the kids' reels and stuff, but I wasn't upset, or even surprised, when we caught absolutely nothing.

With all the rain clouds blown out of the sky, it had become really hot. Standing on the riverside in the blazing sun made me quickly want to end our fishing expedition, and go somewhere like the air-conditioned quarry building (it may not have been air-conditioned, but at least it was shaded). So, we went back to camp, and packed everything up. That was kind of hellish, because it was raining, windy, and cold when we chose our campsite, so shade wasn't really on our mind. After fishing, the inside of our tent was possibly twice the temperature of the outdoors around it.

We were glad to get back to the visitor center, and catch the shuttle bus up to the quarry. So, I just finished talking about how cool the ancient petroglyphs were because they're around 1,000 years old, but then we went to the dinosaur quarry and looked at bones preserved in rocks from the Mesozoic Era, between 66-245 million years ago.

Maybe I need to start etching blog entries into stone tablets or something like that. Then maybe they'll survive for whatever alien archeologists come to investigate our planet 245 million years from now. I bet they'd be really interested in what vacations were like for an utterly average and undistinguished twenty-first century man. You know, what flowers he liked to take pictures of and whether he caught any fish or not. That'll be some must read granite tablets.

Anyway, the quarry was cool. There were bones imbedded in this two (or three) story wall still, and the ones at ground level you were allowed to touch.

There were reassembled bones, probably actually replicas of bones that had been found, placed into displays so that they looked how they would have looked when archeologists discovered them.

These were cool, but you weren't supposed to touch them, just look this time.

They also had bones reassembled the way they would have been if there were a body surrounding the bones. You know, what you would usually see at a dinosaur museum.

Once we'd seen it all, we took a ride back down the hill in the shuttle bus. Back at the visitor center, we got Little's Junior Ranger badge, as well as some extra things they could get at this monument, namely the Junior Paleontologist badge and the Night Explorer patch that they earned at our ranger program the night before.

Then it was time to go home. Well, we could have stayed a while longer, but I was done. It was really hot, and packing up the tent in the heat and unshaded sun had taken a lot out of me, not to mention the poor sleep I got on our leaky air mattresses. I was ready to just go, the drive was around three hours, and I was going to drive the whole way, so I had to do it while I still had the energy to stay awake.

Interestingly, as soon as we hit the road, the rain began again, and it poured on us the whole way home. At least this time I didn't have to worry about camping in it anymore.

Oh, one last thing: they didn't have any patches at the visitor center; they had sold out of them. But they gave me the website for the people who supplied them, and I was able to order a patch for my collection from them. So, here's my newest addition, which I know you really wanted to see: