Written by My niece will be getting one of these for her first birthday. Because I adore my sister and I consider it my duty to purchase toys that will torture her.
Toys
Simplify
Written by “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
– Henry David Thoreau (“Walden”, 1854)
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Self Reliance”, 1841)
FREEZING
Good grief it’s cold today. The fog settled in overnight and I drove to work in an overcast that delayed the district’s busses by 2 hours. Kids have straggled in all day and it’s been bone-chillingly cold. This will be a nice weekend though. My sister’s baby shower is tomorrow and when I get home, we’re going shopping for a new bed. I’m quite happy to keep the bed we have now because I’ve had it for a while but it’s not that conducive to 2 people sleeping on it, especially one who has insomnia and RLS. So Rob’s insisting and I’m not putting up much of a fight. The fun part is looking for new headboards.Â
Now, if I could just get my fingers and toes to unclench a bit, I could actually function properly today. Because I take meds for my migraines that slow my circulatory system, I am easily ice cold, even when it’s hot outside. I don’t mind it in the summer but in winter, I’m dying. I can lay in bed under 5 blankets and still have freezing cold feet.  Today, I didn’t even think about putting socks on because of the shoes I’m wearing. One quick trip to the office to turn in a cell phone and my toes are like ice. Typing is keeping my hands warmed up but I keep making mistakes and deleting.Â
It’s been a quiet Friday so far. Even my most obnoxious class was pretty good. Why can’t my classroom have a fireplace?
Bedtime
It’s been freakin’ cold here this week, cold and wet and generally miserable. Upshot, we’re running fireplace a lot and the flannel sheets are snugly on the bed. Sleeping on a cold night is so much more tolerable when you’re sleeping on flannel.
I think we may finally be getting a handle on this sleep situation. The breakthrough – if that’s what it is – came about earlier this week after a particularly bad night of restless leg syndrome, tossing and turning, irritable skulking to the uncomfortably mushy guest room bed and yet another rough night of broken sleep for both of us. We’d both had enough of this crap and got to talking hard about solving the problem once and for all. And then I made a mental connection to a client project I did over Thanksgiving week.
One of my regular clients is a company that produces expansion joints for large industrial boiler systems; I’ve recently been researching and writing reams of material on steel bellows, how they’re made, what they do and why they’re necessary. That took me into topics like thermal expansions and how multi-ply steel construction impacts joint elasticity.. and about how steel springs (which is basically what a metal expansion joint is made of) can conduct unwanted vibrations over ductwork. Basically, when you buy an expansion joint, you want one that will not transmit vibrations, absorbing them instead of passing them on to connected components.
And then it hit me: vibration isolation. Steel springs. Vibration isolation. Twitchy feet. Mattress springs. VIBRATION ISOLATION!!
Manic research ensued.
It’s the damned mattress! I nicknamed it the Oak Slab not long after I first came here. It’s very firm – hard, actually – and takes some practice to get comfortable sleeping on. And it transmits vibrations like we’re sleeping on a snare drum. Every move, every turn, every twitch, every time the cat shifts position.. you feel it across the whole bed. We’ve known for a long time that we need a king size bed. Now we also know that we need one with a high enough coil count to absorb movement stresses and vibration. And we need to start shopping for it SOON.
It’s bizarre sometimes, when client work dovetails with regular life like that. But I’m not complaining.