What's Your Bank Balance?

It's still early in the New Year, those who made resolutions have hopefully survived this long without giving them up.  I am not one to make resolutions, except for that one year where I came up with the most loosely contrived wellness resolution ever -- to do one of the 4 following good things each day a) exercise b) get 8 hours sleep c) remember to moisturize or d) eat some damn vegetables.  I figured that even on the very worst of days I could remember to slap some moisturizer on my face.  As it turns out, I am a flawed creature, and a decade later I am still trying to incorporate this policy consistently in my life, but I have a higher ratio of success now than I did back then.

These days I have having the most success with b) get 8 hours sleep.  In fact, I have discovered that left undisturbed by my nemesis the alarm clock, I can consistently sleep 9 or even 10 hours a day.  This is a phenomenon that has never really had the chance to happen before in my life, so I decided to do a little research on the magic of sleep.

We all know that about 8 hours is recommended, that we rarely get it, and there is REM (rapid eye movement) and non-REM sleep.  But there is a lot more to it.  You have 4-5 approximately 90 minutes cycles of REM/Non-REM sleep with intermittent wakefulness that you might not even know is happening (presuming you are sleeping the proper amount).  REM is the stage where you eyes are rapidly flitting about beneath your eyelids, and the time in which you dream.  It is theorized that REM sleep plays a big role in memory, cognition, and learning.  Newborns spend about 80% of the sleep in REM sleep whereas adults spend 20-25%.  If you don't get enough sleep, the brain will try to make up on the lost REM sleep first.  Interestingly, the brain shuts down a lot of neurotransmitters during REM sleep...your muscles are actually paralyzed in normal REM sleep (creeeeeepy).

How does the whole cycle thing work again?  You start out with a non-REM phase, that gives way to a short REM phase (about 10 minutes), then you go into non-REM again, and then into a longer REM phase....each phase or REM gets longer and the non-REM parts get slower,  One cycle is about 90 minutes.  In the non-REM phase, there are 4 subphases that go from shallow to deep sleep (trick -- set you alarm for a 90 minute interval...it is much easier to wake up when you are not is stage 4 of non-REM sleep where you are dead to the world).  By the time you reach stage 4, your blood pressure and heart rate are down as much as 30%, a lot of bodily functions are in a nice low idle, but tissue regeneration in in full gear.  Hmmm...that's interesting right?

Sometimes we think running on less than optimal sleep (say 8 hrs +/- 1 hr for individual variation) has a cost of simply feeling sluggish.  But it leads to a decrease in learning and problem solving ability...the quintessential exhausted student doing worse on an exam than they would if they didn't stay up all night cramming or stressing about it.  Lack of sleep means missing out on REM time -- memory and other brain functions we kinda take for granted, and non-REM time, missing out on tissue repair and healing.  Kinda big deals.  Plus there is the increased cortisol secretion when sleep deprived and/or stressed, which has the unwelcome side effect of telling the body to increase fat stores right on the waistline.  And decreased immune function -- you are more likely to get sick and more frequently if you are sleep deprived.  The whole thing snowballs because the extra cortisol also causes problems with memory formation and retrieval, further inhibits immune function, decreases bone formation which can lead to osteoporosis, decreases collagen production (making you wrinkly...er), and increased blood pressure among other things.

Can you make up for lost sleep?  Yes and no.  If you miss sleep, you acquire a debt in your sleep bank, and you can actually make up for it on the weekend if you are talking one and two hours.  And you should.  If you have a decade or two of debt to make up for, you may have bankrupted the sleep bank.  You cannot sleep off the extra pounds accumulated by your increased cortisol level, you cannot undo the missed chances for tissue healing and regeneration and sleep up a fix for something that got damaged (ie/ you can't sleep off that wrinkle or sleep away a scar in that muscle that you already tore long ago).  But...you can improve memory, problem solving, and cognition with a good night sleep...and by sleeping or turning in early 1 or 2 hours on the weekend.  You can lower your body's level of the villain cortisol (we do need it for some good things by the way) and prevent a couple of extra pounds and wrinkles from sticking to you like glue this year.  You can let your body maximize healing and cellular regeneration (anti-aging, normal maintenance, stuff you need).

If you are sleep deprived and you have a chance to turn off the alarm clock and life on a vacation and let yourself sleep naturally, you can expect your body to claim 10 hours or more for several nights if making up for a long term deprivation.  There comes a point where it will catch up all that it can, and you will go back to that approximate 8 hours of sleep.  My personal study on this shows it can go on for quite some time if you are trying to make restitution for decades worth of withdrawals from the sleep bank.  If I ever catch up will let you know.  Anyway, the moral of this story is this :

 

Sleep, activity, adventures, work, family, hobbies, are all opposing groups wanting your time...sleep needs 8 hours, work needs 8, that leaves you 8 for everything else.  Someone is going to lose.  It's up to you.  If you can't be good to yourself with sleep, there is always moisturizer, exercise and vegetables right?  Be good to yourselves today, even if just in one small way :)  And don't feel guilty about lazing around in bed this year, you might need it more than you ever knew.

Nett Dich Kennenzulernen

Nett dich kennenzulernen!  (which kinda sounds like net dich ken-nen-zoo-lair-nen from what I recall of Deutsch 101).  It just means nice to meet you, but most things are more fun to say in German, and so three days in, I say net dich kennenzulernen to 2015.  See, it's fun, admit it, you are rolling your tongue in it right now.

I think me and 2015 are going to get along just fine.  I learned some lessons in patience in 2014.  I turned zoom into zzzzz...well, actually I had little choice in the matter, but I can appreciate the benefits of middleground between the two at this point.  Three days in, I am taking on slow and small progressions.  Checking things off the to do list.  I am of course still waiting on some rather important papers, and making frequent but pleasant phone calls and inquiries on that front.  I got around to packing away my Christmas ornaments.  I learned how to use my little Bluetooth speaker I got for Christmas.  I braved coloring my own hair and said goodbye to blond and hello to auburn.  And pulled out some mad kitchen skills that no one believes I had and made and orange-dark-chocolate-raspberry mousse to quell the impending burn of a spicy Asian dish that simmered all afternoon.  Over the past couple of days I have pedalled away some of my holiday sins on the exercise bike (the one thing I can do with a bum knee), and read a couple of books. 

I spent the day in a flurry of chocolate shavings, chili peppers and Rhiana and Lady Gaga blaring from my little speaker.  My third book by John Green of the week (Paper Towns), awaits, and I believe I am developing a TV crush on one of CNN's advisors on aviation disasters which means I am probably old and the aviation industry needs an overhaul when they are the most recognizable figures I see on television.  I have done courses.  I have photographed everything that doesn't move in the area (which outnumbers the things that do move on this landscape).  I have drunk vast quantities of coffee.  Visited lots.  In short...I am ready 2015.  I am rested.  But...here I am still in Saskatchewan.

So there is little else to discuss except a book review.   I can recommend "The Fault In Our Stars" by John Green.  It's a novel centered around teenagers, but so was the Hunger Games and the Twilight series.  Hunger Games was a hit in both the written and cinematic forms.  Hollywood dealt a severe injustice to the written words of Twilight, which was so well written it moved me to tears in points...and I am not a book crier, except maybe in one Jodi Piccoult novel (was it my Sister's Keeper or Nineteen Minutes?).  "The Fault In Our Stars," is not a classic because of an upredictable plot.  It deals with teenagers with cancer, which is understandably sad and tragic.  But it is the outlook of the characters that make the novel special.  Their humour, their superfluous vocabulary, their unintentional teenage angsty commentary just perfectly captures the spirit of some rather exceptional teens trying to be ordinary in unordinary circumstances.  The book doesn't try too hard to explain it, which I am guilty of in that last sentence, but just catches it right...it flows.

In short, if you find yourself with some extra time and have been wondering what all the fuss is about with this book / movie...grab the book.  Give it a read.  I really enjoyed it.  And that is all I have to report on today.  Guten nacht (which wants to autocorrect to nonsense about gluten).... or good night.

That's A Wrap!

I realize it will probably be January 3rd by the time I post this blog about the end of 2014.  I wanted to be safely sure it was over before I gave thanks for the end of that year.  I think we're good now, and I can flirt with the new romance that is 2015, my invisible inevitable path forward without 2014 sneaking up behind me and laying another blow. 

 

In retrospect, 2014 was pretty interesting.  There was a lot of change, and still a lot of good stuff.  I saw a lot of beauty, and as if to remind me of this, the sun lit of the sky for one last glorious sunset December 31, 2014.  It seemed to me it was trying to hang on a little longer, a little brighter than it had in days past.  Nature provided me the ceremonious closure I was hoping for as I await my new start, and I watched the sun set on 2014 with a smile on my face...not a smug one, but an appreciative one for the good experienced and the bad survived.

 

As I settled in with my sunsetty westward thoughts, I did glance behind, to the east and to the coming night of the New Year.  The story would have been better if I had been facing the New Year forward instead of behind, but that would be a lie, so will stick to the original.  The future, misguidedly behind me for just a few more minutes, was almost a literal blank canvas.  The fortune teller inside me wants to say that this means 2015 will be the product of my efforts and imagination...it can be whatever I make it to be, no obstacles, no surprises.

I tried to take a couple of photos on a couple of different settings on my camera, and got two very different impressions of the same scene, seconds apart.  It reminded me on a lecture several years ago sponsored by the ever awesome Alberta Sports Park Reaction & Wildlife.  That lecture was on perspective.  In it the analogy they used was that of a window, and the difference between photos taken from several different windows in a home to a gorgeous panoramic scene out front of that home.  All of the photos were beautiful, but the bigger panoramic was the obvious masterpiece.  The point is that we all have our windows...the things that form our views, and make our view different from someone standing in a similar but slightly different place.  Our windows show us great things, but have blind spots, limitations, and boundaries.  This isn't bad, the different views are just as true as our own in many cases, but it is important to open your windows, shift your windows, and try to see all that you can see.  In a nutshell, it's about perspective.  We so often talk about perspective with regards to being positive or negative in attitude, but perspective is so much more.  Broadening and changing perspectives allows you to identify new opportunities and get a better outlook on challenges.  It offers new ways to look at solving problems, and helps you see the bigger end goal.  Perspective is what I think of when I look at these 2 photos at the end of my 2014.

The first is blue.  There was a lot of blue in my 2014.  My grandma died in January.  An aunt, an uncle, a neighbour, my favorite boat captain, an animal activist icon in Bermuda, and my bestest buddy the Lexi cat all died in 2014 as well.  I had to have surgery.  I had a bike accident and might just need another surgery.  This means there was a lot less jogging and some weight gain that I am fervently trying to reverse.  I made some tough decisions.  I left Bermuda.  I didn't return to Edmonton.  I ended up in Saskatchewan much longer than expected.  My carefully laid plans for 2014 had delay after delay after delay.  It gave me more tough decisions.

 

The flip side is this second picture, which is simply aglow and fiery.  2014 also provided many things I have needed for a long time.  Rest.  Time.  I spent 7 months saying goodbye to beautiful Bermuda and irreplaceable friends, and then 5 months rediscovering Saskatchewan, family, and old irreplaceable friends.  I learned to drive a combine for one thing, and have spent more time in Regina, Saskatoon, and Medicine Hat than I had in all the years I lived close to them.  I got a few girls weekends in, made it to Boston (3 times), Las Vegas, Calgary, Whitefish, and even spent 10 whole days in Edmonton, 4 or 5 of those blissfully watching parachutes come out of the sky at Eden North.  It was my first Christmas home in 6 years.

Blue or ablaze, it was all part of my life this past year.  Good or bad it is all part of the past.  It has slipped beneath the horizon of time just as 2014 faded out over the farm in this last picture.

I spent January 1st with no resolutions, no vigor for attacking the new year.  It was a day of rest, a quasi silent reverie for two thousand fourteen, all it gave, all it claimed.

Behind the Curve

There are a lot of jokes about Saskatchewan...things happening slowly and what not.  Change, and pretty much anything else, can't really sneak up on you in Saskatchewan...it's flat, you can see things coming for miles...and of course, most things are smart enough not to sneak up on presumably armed country folks.  And so things are rumoured to amble along in their own slow sweet time, and sometimes some things, say the latest fashion crazes, never arrive.  In fact, cable TV still hasn't made it here, and in some silent agreement between the population and satellite providers, it never will.  Fortunately we now have the small Bell ExpressVu Satellite, but, it still looks like we are prepared for alien communication on the old giant car sized dish mounted out behind the house from the 80's.  The joke is we can be a bit behind the times out here in the boonies.

However, as I woke this morning, I felt it more than ever.  Australia was already in a whole other year.  I saw two former Bermuda friends dressed in savvy suits under balloons and the glow of the impending new year over in Doha while I had my morning coffee.  Dublin and Glasgow friends have less than 3 hours to go, and while they raise bubbles of champagne, I will still be back in 2014 thinking about the proverbial last supper of 2014.  Even Bermuda is going to beat me across the 2014 finish line...and they are on ISLAND TIME for heaven's sake.

I am looking forward to 2015.  The symbolism of a barrier between the parts of 2014 that I did not like and the parts of the future I am looking forward to.  The idea that at the stroke of midnight I am closer to the start of the next adventure than to the end of the last one.  That the setbacks that have plagued me will somehow be trapped on the other side of the invisible divisor of 2014 and 2015, the red tape tying me down will unravel and I will bound happily off into future.  I remember feeling just like this in 2010...sitting on a patio looking out into the Atlantic in December waiting for the magic wand of the New Year to wave.  If I recall, January and February were spent on that same patio, with the same company, wondering why it was all still the same.  It did all turn around...in the spring.  Here's to a speedy wrap up things this time around.

Come on 2015...I am ready for you.  For the inevitable and invisible future, as John Green woefully stated through a character citing existential myopia.  And to my friends who are already on the other side waiting for me to get with the times -- be there soon, save me some of the good stuff!  Happy New Year everybody!

Just a random road to nowhere in Saskatchewan, meant of course to symbolize the path ahead, blah blah blah

Catlady Stigma

I always get called a catlady.  I laugh at it, but sometimes think it is a bit unfair.  I only have 2 cats, and that was because they really really needed a home...even the shelter had given up on them.  Now of course, once I got them, I fell in love with them, despite their antisocial food hoarding ways and the fact that my love is unrequited.  However, it recently dawned on me that I am the victim of an unfortunate social stigma.

 

I am not going to name names, but I recently witnessed, and documented, the following Christmas melee.

 

 

 

The questions the first photo raises are obvious.  Why?  Why would you do this to your poor cat?  How?  How did you expect this would go is the next logical question. The answer, is a bit like this, although the cat is just catchin up in this conversation and still thinking "Why????"

 

This might be the unhappiest cat picture ever taken.  The second cat got lucky, he only had to wear a tie, and since the other cat looked much more foolish he was relatively content.

 

Now.  These are not my cats, not my cat costumes.  But I am allegedly a catlady while the perpetrator of these events is allegedly not.  Why?  It appears the determination of catladiness is not the number of cats, or even the ridiculousness of cat exploits, but marital status.  I might as well get another cat.  And some reindeer costumes.  Meh.  Merry Christmas!

Starry Night



 

 

I saw Van Gogh's "Starry Night" at the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It's a cool painting, and really does capture one of those nights where the sky is a deep shade of cobalt lit up by bright skies.  The painting shows a perspective from outside of the city, which even in 1889 may have had enough indoor lighting spilling into the night through windows to require an observer of the stars to head outside of the city a bit to really do so.  This painting is probably more famous in today's pop culture, but he painted a similar one in 1888 of the skies and house lights reflecting off the Rhone River.

 

 

I like to think about how these paintings would have been considered by those who viewed them in 1888 or 1889.  In that now unimaginable time when access was limited -- there were no color photographs and would not be for 50 years, and it would be 115 years until my beloved internet allowed me to just pull it up online.  Had I lived in 1890, would I have possibly heard word of a new beautiful painting (obviously at some ball involving hoop skirts, although presumably I would still have been a terrible dancer)?  Only if I were lucky could I have seen it, for it was owned privately by different parties until 1906.  But human taste remains the same in some instances, this being one.  It is still alluring to look at the original 126 years later, and humans still look up into the same clear night sky when Venus and a quarter moon hold court.  I am still drawn to painting of light in darkness, and still feel my gaze drawn upwards on a starry night.  Which brings me to the point -- Saskatchewan has not much urban space, and therefore one sees a lot of stars in the sky.

 

so many stars

 

Starry night 2014....not exactly a masterpiece, but....

There was a streetlight that shone in my window in Bermuda, and I could never quite get the room dark enough.  I was looking forward to inky black darkness in the country...but to my surprise, some nights the cumulative effect of the stars and the moon are worse than that streetlight.  The nights here can be totally black if cloudy, but very bright when clear.  Maybe not overly exciting, but, timeless.  And when you have a bad day and feel very small, staring up into all those stars reminds you that comparatively, everything is very small...and somehow that makes it better.

Bittersweet Season

"Death ends a life, but not the relationship." -- Robert Anderson.

I heard this on TV the other day and it rang very true to me.  I googled the author and it is credited to at least 3 different people, most commonly an author who used the phrase in 1997 in a book.  But Robert Anderson, who died in 1967, is also cited, so I will give him credit in this case.

It's Christmas.  Hopefully your trees are up, your presents wrapped, baking done, eggnog ready for cheer, and all is well in your world.  I am pretty well ready.  I love the Christmas season...the preparation, the days of thoughtful gift shopping, the parties, sending out Christmas cards, decorating my tree, and seeing for just a brief period the unified effort of people all around you focusing on the very same thing.  Christmas Day itself is a different story.

It used to be my favorite day of the year, until 2009 when my niece and her two friends were killed on a March evening by a moron who hit them by speeding through an intersection on the wrong side of the road while they were turning in it.  Christmas Day, and all holidays, are forever one person short of a family event.  The girl who lit up 16 Christmases with her excitement and smile is forever gone.

This morning in Florida, a colleague and part of the Bermuda circle of friends, will be laid to rest following a car accident as well.  The circumstances are different of course, but grief is weighing heavy on many in Bermuda and beyond today.  Greg was a big guy, with a big heart.  Greg served with the US armed forces, I think it was the air force, and he was hugely patriotic.  Sometimes his views on this clashed with other friends from other countries, but no argument no matter how good or logical ever swayed him from that deeply rooted American pride on pretty much any subject matter.  He proved to be good counsel to some friends in need, and was always happy to chat.  He enjoyed pina colada's and golf on his time off, and probably scores of other things I didn't know about.  What I do know is he always met me with a hug at work, and that says a lot about a person.

I think many times people don't know what to say to a family who has lost someone, be it child, parent, sibling, or spouse.  So they say nothing at all.  That silence may be more comfortable for you, but it does nothing to alleviate the pain of a family who is missing someone.  The thing I have learned in grief is that I don't want the person I cherished to be banished from conversation or 'left out.'  I love opening facebook and seeing that someone else has found a new picture, or posted a note.  I love that she is still loved, still thought about.  People may not tell you about it, but they have little 'rituals' -- the obvious is visiting the grave site, leaving flowers.  There is also lighting candles.  Inclusion in prayers.  I visit the accident site.  I still buy her gifts because I cannot bear to Christmas shop without doing so.  Pictures.  Scrapbooks.  There is much already being done silently by a family who grieves.  Do not be afraid to say "You must miss her/him."  Do not be afraid to bring up old stories, good memories, as those bring smiles in their wake.  Is it possible you might get tears?  Maybe.  So what?  That's what friends are for.

And so, my heart goes out to the family of Greg Strickland today.  And also to the scores of friends who are also celebrating Christmas one smile short this year.  I know it will still be a happy day, but I also know there will be moments when the pang of loss is present too.  I can only hope you feel your loved one close in heart and mind when it does.