Whine and Cheese

 I cannot promise greatness today. Or goodness. Or general coherence. I have been going through my blog posts from the first one in January 2009 and noticing how much I talk about coughing and lack of sleep. Since I was diagnosed with sleep apnea which they think started in my adolescence but wasn't diagnosed until I was in my forties, I'm happy to observe and report and remind myself to feel grateful about the fact that I cough less. Something about my airways being chronically inflamed because of all the gasping desperately for oxygen, I presume.

It would be really awesome if I could report that the sleep apnea treatment had solved all my problems with, you know, SLEEP, but not so much. To be fair, going up against the perimenopause and Covid anxiety twofer is a tall order. But even before, I was never one of the poster children for a CPAP being a lifechanging miracle. That's okay, I don't require a lifechanging miracle. The CPAP was helping, until I hit perimenopause. 

My nighttime routine is pretty much unchanging and appalling right now. Whether or not I force myself to go to bed earlyish (before midnight) or when I actually feel it (well after midnight), at some point I will feel pleasantly drowsy, put on my mask and lie down and drift off. For about ten minutes. Then I'm wide awake, with electrical currents running through my legs that make it impossible not to thrash, and I don't fall deeply asleep until near dawn. Then I either force myself to get up at a semi-reasonable time (before eleven) or I sleep until I'm more rested (after noon). I feel like I'm in the sunken place. I'm embarrassed that the people live with know I'm sleeping late most days (which is dumb because they don't care). I'm frustrated because anything I've tried (walking a lot, walking less, stretching, cool shower, over-the-counter sleep meds, marijuana edibles) either doesn't work or works for two nights and then stops working. It sucks. But that's how it is for now, so I'm putting it here and moving on with my weird, fucked-up-sleep-routine life.

So in my sleep-lacking, perimenopausal, covid-anxious brain fog, I wandered into Eve's room the other day and saw this:

I started to compliment her on her really well-laid out French presentation on Mesopotamia. Then I stopped. Because she's in Grade twelve and she's not taking French or anything to do with Mesopotamia. I thought she had taken complete leave of her senses and concocted an entire useless presentation in her sleep or something. 

She looked at my face, looked at the board and said "I'm just reusing the back of the bristol board for my English artefact for The Great Gatsby.

Whew.


Could be worse. I could have this guy's last name.


I was about to make fun of the people who labelled this cheese, like yeah, who wants to enjoy a big block of cheese the same night they buy it. But I just made mac and cheese in the instant pot and used, if not the equivalent of this block of cheese, very close to it, so maybe I'll stfu about that.


I was filling in in the school office almost constantly the last few weeks before we locked down because the Office Administrator was on stress leave (no effing kidding). We were giving out water bottles in the school office for kids that forget theirs at home, and then we switched to giving out paper cups to fill at the water fountain.  This seemed sort of petty and mean to me and I was skeptical of the cost savings and general environmental impact, but I don't make the rules and I wasn't up to protesting. So we were out of the paper cups and Heather, who usually buys stuff like that, wasn't there. Carla gave me the school credit card and instructions to buy... paper cups. This was a little stressful since I didn't really know what ones to buy or what a reasonable price was, but I'm of an age where I don't obsess about this stuff QUITE AS MUCH as I used to. I went to Metro. They had compostable cups like the ones we had just run out of at school, but only with lids, and they were quite a bit more expensive for something we didn't actually need. 

So I bought these, and said "sorry if it makes it look like I'm sending the students to a kegger" and the vice president got a good laugh out of it, which we all really needed.


Angus is doing quite a bit better, judging both from his texts and from the forensic accounting we're able to do with the credit card bills: 1.67 at 7-11 (Gatorade); 4.58 at Dunkin' Donuts (breakfast); 10.44 at Stoney Ridge Winery; 12.35 at Barnstormer Winery; 9.87 at Lakewood Vineyards; etc. This does my heart, if not his liver, some good. 

Now I'm going to go read and then probably have a crappy night's sleep. Although it occurs to me that I haven't yet tried drinking a bottle of wine out of a Red Solo cup, as a sleep aid or just for general recreational purposes.