My family

Family Stories Vlog

EASY QUEASY

12 Dec 2016

My friend Gilbert was an insomniac.  Whenever I first saw him, he always gave a report on how bad the previous night had been.  I can't remember now his average hour of sleep a night, but I thought about that for years when I averaged 4 hours of sleep at night.  Something happened recently in the last year or so and I'm now getting about 6 hours of sleep at night, broken into two parts, getting up at 3 a.m. almost every night to switch from couch to recliner (and then a nap in the afternoon).

If I decide to go to sleep early, I can count on the night being bad.  Last night I was having neck ache when I held my head erect, but not when I looked down, so decided to chuck it in and go to sleep around 10:30.  Sure enough, I could not get to sleep for love or money.  Didn't work on the couch and I remembered I have one of those seed-filled things that I could heat in the microwave, so I tried that and it helped my neck, but I was still wide awake.

I finally went back to the couch around 2 or so after I found a lone Advil to take.  It didn't work sleeping in one direction, so I tried the other direction and that worked for a bit.  I expected it to be 4 or 5 when I woke up, but when the dogs got up with me (they never get up at that hour of the morning), I realized it was later.  And indeed it was 6 a.m.

But my stomach wasn't feeling all that steady  The thought of food was not a pleasant one, which is when I came up with the title for this entry.  Now that I've been up for nearly 3 hours, though, the queasiness seems to be gone.  Still have the neck pain, though.

Don't you hate people who complain about their aches and pains?

I can't coddle myself, though because today is Neuro Day and I'm hoping my mother won't be "sick" and I can drag her to Sacramento to get her Neurology workup.  One of the things keeping me awake last night was fear that she would pass out on the half hour drive to the hospital and what would I do.  Leave her alone and drive directly to the ER?

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In the 'be still my heart' category, we actually saw a movie yesterday.  There is so much buzz about Manchester by the Sea that I wanted to see it before all the awards shows.  My friend Derrick Bang, who is a movie critic for the Davis Enterprise, wrote a wonderful review of it, which captures the movie perfectly (without any spoilers).  It's really a difficult movie to explain plot-wise, but Casey Affleck is amazing.

We don't see movies much.  It's not that we don't like movies.  We love movies, but we see so many stage shows (75 so far this year, with one more left before the end of the year).  But I had just read "Room" and was curious to see how it translated to the screen so we saw that movie in January. 

In August we saw Florence Foster Jenkins.  We felt ahead of the game because we had heard of Ms. Jenkins before the rest of the world.  Our friend Stephen Peithman told us about her and we actually own a Florence Foster Jenkins record, believe it or not!  I loved the movie and especially seeing Simon Helberg playing something other than Howard Wolowitz (The Big Bang Theory).  For anyone not familiar with Florence Foster Jenkins, check this Wikipedia page.

Less than a month later, unbelievably, we went to another movie.  We saw Sully, which I loved.  I had people who complained that Tom Hanks didn't look enough like Sully Sullenberger, but my God, his performance was terrific.  That movie actually affected me more than I ever dreamed possible.  From the very first time they show the plane coming down on the Hudson River I started crying and I pretty much cried for the rest of the movie.

And now 3 months later it's Manchester.  I really, really want to see LaLa Land and hope maybe to see it before the end of the year, bringing our total for the year to five, which is more than twice what we saw last year or the year before (two each).

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I was so pleased that we were finally able to rid our house of tribbles yesterday.

About a year ago, I bought a dog bed.  I bought this particular bed because it was the cheapest of the ridiculously priced dog beds at Petco.  When I got home, I realized that the bed was intended to be covered with a sheet and then a top, which would make the price more than the other ridiculously priced dog beds.  But I decided our dogs didn't need all that frou-frou so I just put the bed down as is.

Well, that worked for awhile, but both Polly and Lizzie are nest builders and they may go for weeks sleeping in the bed, but then they have to build a nest in it, clawing frantically at the lining.  The bed on the left above has a strong enough covering that it can withstand the clawing, but in short order, the new bed was all over the family room.  I spent weeks cleaning up bed stuffing, which I finally decided increased so quickly the bed was actually stuffed with tribbles.

Amazingly, the bed has lasted more than a year.  Maybe two years.  The dogs finally got all the stuffing out of the bottom of the bed and were still happy to sleep in it, their heads resting on the ridge around the outside.

A couple of weeks ago, Polly viciously attacked the ridge and once again tribbles proliferated on the floor.  I gave up throwing them away, I just piled them all back in the bed and they could sleep on a cloud of green tribbles.

But I decided to check Amazon for prices on dog beds and found a whole bunch of them half the price of the cheapest beds at Petco, so I ordered a new bed.  This is supposed to be for a "medium sized dog," which it clearly is not, but since Lizzie rarely sleeps in a bed, but more on the bed, with paws hanging over the edge, it works perfectly for her.

(Of course the dog in the big bed is the Chihuahua and Lizzie is in the little bed).

Best of all, the tribbles have now been relegated to the garbage can where, I am certain they will no longer be any tribble at all.