Month: April 2022

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Sunday/ to sleep, perchance to dream 🌃

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
– from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

The results from last night is promising, and more in line of what I experienced as far as my sleep: in bed for almost 8 hrs, and asleep for a little less than 7.

 

The Apple Health app that tracks my sleep every night, has been reporting only 4 to 5 hours of sleep for me, even after I had been in bed ‘sleeping’ for the most part of 8 hrs.

I generally feel OK in the daytime, so I believe I get more than 4 or 5 hours of official ‘sleep’.

For comparison with the Apple Health app, I’m trying an app called Sleep Cycle (screen shot on the right). The results from last night look encouraging (more accurate).

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Saturday/ a hail storm

Here’s another gorgeous picture by Tim Durkan, of tonight’s hail storm. It was fine hail, but it went on for much longer than usual.

Photographer Tim Durkan says he sat in his car as he watched it come in from the north: from Edmonds, then over Discovery Park, and then over the city of Seattle.

Picture by Tim Durkan (@timdurkan on Twitter), ‘Seattle-based photographer capturing moments that help define our city and times’. More pictures at http://timdurkan.com.
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Friday/ let’s hear it for lidocaine

The original packaging for lidocaine, labeled LL30 for its Swedish inventors Löfgren and Lundqvist. Clinical trials started in 1944 and a few years later it was used around the world. The compound was overwhelmingly superior to local anesthetics in use at the time.

The hard cast came off my wrist and forearm today. In addition, two stainless steel pins were extricated. The surgeon pulled them out with sterile pliers, basically.

The pins had held the lunate and scaphoid bones against each other so that the new scapholunate ligament could establish itself.

The second pin had a slight bend in (by design), and was not easy to pull out. I was very thankful for the fat syringe of lidocaine that was deployed on my wrist. Lidocaine blocks the pain signals that nerve cells send to the brain, by interfering with the so-called sodium channel that is the pathway for the signals.

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Thursday/ tulips🌷

It was 70 °F (21 °C) here in the city today; it will be a lot cooler again tomorrow.
These tulips are from the little Thomas Street Garden by 10th Avenue.

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Wednesday/ of buds and brews

The breakfast Buds I had looked for far and wide, suddenly showed up on the shelf in the QFC on Broadway, and I grabbed four boxes.
Push had come to shove, and I was no longer playing nice by taking only one or two boxes!

And ⁠— I returned my ‘black stainless’ coffee maker, and got a slightly different model, after all.

Interesting how the wide-angle lens of the iPhone 13 Pro makes ‘vanishing edges’ of the sides of the boxes of All-Bran Buds.
My new Cuisinart coffeemaker has a bigger digital display, and a slightly bigger carafe as well. Yay! Now I can leave the instant coffee behind, and go back to filtered coffee again: the stuff that is a royal treat, fit for a king.
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Tuesday/ 12 years of Obamacare

Former President Obama was in the White House today for the first time after leaving office (more than 5 years ago, Jan. 2017).

Obama was there to celebrate 12 years of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) with President Biden. They also announced that they are pursuing expanded coverage for families, and how to make it easier to enroll.

Also mentioned in the reporting today, was Biden’s famous hot-mike comment ‘This is a big f**king deal’, which he made in 2010 as the ACA was signed into law.
I couldn’t agree more.
The Affordable Care Act has saved me a lot of anguish⁠— and tens of thousands of dollars in health insurance costs, just over the last five years.

The East Room in the White House today. As former President Obama took the podium, he started with ‘Vice-President Biden, Vice President (Kamala Harris) .. ‘ then stopped. ‘That is a joke!’ he said, and walked over to shake President Biden’s hand.
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Monday/ after the storm, a rainbow🌈

It looks like the stormy weather of the past two days is clearing up.
Seattle photographer Tim Durkan (@timdurkan on Twitter) posted this gorgeous picture today⁠—of a piece of blue sky and a brilliant rainbow over the city.
I believe his vantage point was off Alki Avenue SW in West Seattle, on the very edge of the waters of Elliott Bay.

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Sunday/ how to write about loss

My brothers and I learned tonight that our beloved mom had passed away in the early hours of Monday morning in South Africa.

 

Above: a stanza from a 2003 poem by Johann de Lange (Afrikaans). I tried my hand at a rough translation, on the right.

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Caturday 🙀

Reporter Matt Kaplan writes in the New York Times that a wildlife camera recorded a bobcat repeatedly eating eggs from a Burmese python’s nest.
It is not yet known if this is commonly done by bobcats.

It would be a boon if it were: the Burmese python is an invasive species and is decimating the mammal and bird populations there.

A Burmese python and a bobcat facing off in the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida last June, captured by a trap camera set up by the U.S. Geological Survey. In 2019, snake hunters in this preserve caught a 140 lb. female that measured 17 ft in length, and that carried 73 developing eggs. Yikes.
[Photo Credit: U.S.G.S.]