Wordjanitor Strikes Again

I have my second sleep study tonight. Last week I put on my jammies, gathered up my blanket and pillow, drove across town and they wired me up like a giant lab rat with: electrodes to measure my brain waves and stages of sleep (there are 3 plus REM) movement sensors on my legs, arms, and parts of my face a heart rate monitor belts on my chest and tummy to measure movement when I inhale and exhale a microphone a nasal cannula a second measuring something or other under my nose an oxygen saturation probe on my finger And then they told me to sleep. Oh, and don't forget the camera on the wall with the circle of little red lights that you can see even without your glasses. All night. They monitor and watch, collect a ton of data, wake you up at 6a, rip off all the wires, tell you basically nothing, and send you on your way. I did sleep off and on. I woke up whenever there was noise in the hallway -- usually to hear someone tell the guy in the room across the hall to roll over or to ch...

A recent Facebook update by a friend read: Alex is wondering if anyone can explain in one paragraph how to setup a simple mailto contact form on IIS 6.0 (that doesn' Alt like perl - I normally use FormMail). So, being the snot I have grown to be, I commented back: Kim is wondering if she has ever seen a geekier FB update than this nonsense. Please, next time just put in some unix code and dispense with the formalities of actual words. To which, he replied: Kim, you're right. This is for you: 01001001001000000110001101 10000101101110001001110111 01000010000001100010011001 01011011000110100101100101 01110110011001010010000001 11100101101111011101010010 00000110000101100011011101 00011101010110000101101100 01101100011110010010000001 10110001101111011011110110 10110110010101100100001000 00011101000110100001101001 01110011001000000111010101 11000000101110001000000010 00000100111001101111011101 11001000000111011101101000 01101111001001110111001100 10000001110100011010000110 01010010...

Rumor has it I likely have sleep apnea. I suppose repeatedly ceasing breathing in the middle of the night is not a habit one should cultivate or continue. So off I went to a consult yesterday with a pulmonologist/sleep specialist. Some people are just too serious. You can almost see their thought processes on a LED readerboard above their heads. I am a doctor. I have a form. I am going to ask you questions on the form. I will scrawl the answers in the appropriate spaces. I will not deviate from this path. Then, based on your answers, I will give you a rehearsed speech about the next steps. I will not deviate from the script. Want to make a doctor of this variety really uncomfortable? Use multiple-word answers. WAIT, I have a box for yes or no. I don't want to listen to a sentence, I wan't a monosyllabic response. How serious was this guy? He's asking me if I'm sleepy during the day. I honest-to-goodness involuntarily yawned. In fact, I'd been yawning since I landed ...

My (week)daily lunch travels usually take me to the building 3 cafeteria where I fill a compostable plastic container with whole grains, edamame, cucumber, tomatoes, tofu, sunflower seeds, and a bit of soy dressing. There's some variation depending on the veggie selection, but I pretty much have the same thing every day. Yes, because I actually like it. No, really. Every once in awhile, a coworker will catch me eating something from the animal kingdom and react with some surprise that I consume things that used to moo, bok, swim, or otherwise require chasing to catch for use as food. So my absolute glee (yes GLEE) upon receiving an Armadillo Willy's e-mail titled "The Legend Returns" and announcing the return of the Linda's Drive-In Parisian Burger could be quite a shock to some. E-mail marketing sometimes hits the mark. Even to a jaded web marketing chick. You see, the Parisian Burger isn't just a burger. It's nostalgia. It's the one burger place I e...

Luke brought me a holiday gift this year... I had to wait to mention it, but I think it's finally safe. I figured I should be cautious. I spent the last few weeks scouring the headlines, google news searching, and otherwise verifying that come next winter, my dog won't be responsible for going way beyond Seuss's Grinch. When we're up in G'town visiting LD , Luke has the run of the woods. No fences, no leash. He patrols the property using the house as his base. A bird -- or for that matter, a moth -- flutters on the other side of the pond and he's off to the races to check it out. He sleeps quite well at night because he spends the days in nearly constant motion -- generally at high speed crashing through the woods, circling the pond, or traversing the driveway. A couple of days after Christmas, while my dad and I were moving random slash piles to burn piles, Luke emerged triumphant from the woods carrying a branch. As my proud pooch approached, I noticed the br...