Random MomBlog

So I’ve been having a conversation about ADD, and Amy showed me a quick adult ADD screening quiz. (What’s funny here is that my web search turned up the longer quiz first, and I thought to myself, Gah, too long, where’s the short quiz?)

I mean, there’s childhood ADHD to explain why I couldn’t even walk calmly as a kid (too boring) and took 2 hours to fall asleep that usually changes into adult ADD (I thought I was calmer because I’m exhausted with children). I’m not sure there’s a difference between attention deficit and multi-tasking, except that the second is a real asset at work. I think I would write it off as modern life favors multi-tasking, except that I also have incredible focus at times. It’s really productive. And honestly, skittering from one topic to the next, even at work, generally isn’t all that productive. It’s kinda fun to whack-a-mole on my email, but at the end of the day … the more productive days are when I follow my checklist of what to do (or have focus). So while I haven’t internalized it, it sure does make personality sense.

So we all heard about the DNS flaw announced by DoxPara. Boy, was that a busy week for us! Turns out, the secure version of BIND has this little problem with CPU load, accompanied with complaints about file descriptors, above a certain number of DNS queries per second. Ouch.

The immediate key to get it under control was to add ulimit -n 4096 to named.conf so that BIND would use more of the available file descriptors. The fix with more breathing room was to install the next beta version of BIND that has better performance. We’ve been out of the woods since then, and we’re no longer expecting another shoe to flatten us.

In fact, now we can relax while those who didn’t patch have discovered that the flaw has been discovered before its scheduled public announcement … yikes!

I heard that Omar Sharif once said women weren’t frivolous enough to study bridge enough to play world-class bridge. Sandra Landry, a world-class bridge player, thinks men and women play a different game of bridge too.

Landy suggests that the male game is tougher and more aggressive because of testosterone levels. Men, she says, concentrate better, while women are multitasking, unable to give maximum effort to bridge. ‘’Obviously,'’ she says, ‘’women are more balanced and lead less obsessive lives. They play bridge to meet people and to enjoy a stimulating pastime away from home, children and career.'’

For some reason, this also makes me think of cooking. I know a number of people who cook for their families. The men prepare these outstanding meals. Fancy. The women, myself included, aim for fast and healthy. Scoop a one-bowl meal out of the crockpot? Awriiight! It’s a completely different class of cooking. And Sandra’s right, I’m not thinking about just cooking, I’m also thinking about my boys, maybe even thinking about work or about catching up with friends … Impressing anyone with a fancy dinner is not on my radar. And bridge? It’s merely a game. We can skip the cards and just chat, too.

I thought I’d try something simple first for the rough skin on the back of my arms and the back of my legs. I know that soap in the US is very drying because Americans expect lots of suds when they lather, and the sudsing agents are drying. (If your skin feels tight after washing, it got too dry.) Sell more suds, then sell more moisturizers, I suppose. I use a very small amount of moisturizing soap in the shower, not enough for suds but enough to feel the soap slide. However, I use an anti-acne soap on my back because that was the only section of my skin that didn’t improve when I switched to moisturizing soap many many years ago. For the past month, I’ve been very conscientious about not spreading excess anti-acne soap off my back. I’ve trained myself to spread soap thin, so I was putting that extra soap on the back of my arms. Guess what? My arms are so much smoother now! I can’t remember when my upper arms have had such smooth skin. And what a simple fix … I was ready to look at keratosis pilaris treatments, but this is effective and takes less time!

Just (use less) soap. So simple.

As if I needed more reasons not to drink caffeine, it has a half-life in full-term newborns of around 95 hours, infants 80 hours! (The range is 65 to 130 hours.) Yowzah! The peak transfer to breastmilk is 1 to 2 hours later. Half-life indicates a decay pattern that starts with a large initial peak, then tapers off slowly. The half-life is the time to purge half of that caffeine, but there’s still a long tail on the curve: after two half-lives, 25% of the original caffeine still remains.

So this afternoon when it was so hot and I was walking back to my office past the old-fashioned convenience store, I got the caffeine-free Pepsi (less acid than Coke). I don’t know why this baby is awake at 11 PM, but at least I know it’s not because I should have skipped caffeine.

Tonight I was able to start and finish an embroidered monogram in one pass! A first!

The major lessons I’ve learned are always use stabilizer (even on heavy material), and always check the thread, both upper and bobbin, for proper tension if the test piece doesn’t pass.

As always, a dull needle, nicks on the throatplate or bobbin, or poor thread (old, or just not even) will also cause problems. But I’m starting to think I can handle this embroidery machine … that I got three years ago at the very end of June. Ah well, at least I learned my way around it eventually!

I like TiddlyWiki, and I like the d3 version for GTD, but it wasn’t fitting how I wanted to organize tasks at work. The main problem, of course, is that my job doesn’t fit GTD that well. Mainly that Done part. I always need to upgrade software to the latest version, and to fix something, and whatever: I have many eternal projects and loose tasks.

The real problem was that I was using Projects in d3 as Categories. So where do projects go? And so almost every action in some projects was floating, and that breaks down the utility of the powerful Next Action concept.

Well, it’s just JavaScript and I ain’t afraid of no new programming language. So I created Categories for myself, just above Projects, as well as a way to look up uncategorized projects. It’s not difficult.

First I edited the GTDMenu tiddler, adding this line at the very top:
+++(gtdCategoriesSliderState)[Categories]< >===
That line is just like the following line for Projects, except with Categories.

Then I created a tiddler titled CategoryList tagged gtd with these lines:

*<<list tagged \"category -someday\" all>>
*+++(gtdUncategorizedSliderState)[Uncategorized Projects:] <<list tagged \"project -Category1 -Category2 -Category3\" all>>===

Fill in your actual categories instead of those CategoryN placeholders, and you’re set. (Or, if you’re better at JavaScript, list the tiddlers that are tagged project that aren’t tagged with a tiddler tagged category.)

Now make yourself some category tiddlers! Remember to use the category tag to make them show up in the menu on the left.

I know this is geeky, but I like it. You can aggregate all of your blogs, twitter, flickr, Pandora, YouTube, or anything else with an RSS feed into a very attractive timeline at Dipity (it’s even free!). This may sound sad that I needed a timeline tool to show me this (I was sleep-deprived at the time!), but having Dipity correlate my twitter posts with my blog posts made it obvious to me that the benefit of following my baby’s routine was that he started sleeping all night!

If you’d rather have your timeline on your own computer, I also like the SIMILE Timeline a lot. Lifehacker has a Quick and Dirty Event-XMLO-Matic to power SIMILE Timeline, just to make it easy on you!

Geek toys to make timeline pictures … and you know a picture is worth a thousand words!

I always forget which one is which between sprains and strains. A sprain is an injured ligament connecting bones while a strain is an injured tendon connecting muscles. I’ve successfully treated all of my sprains (such a distinctive pain! once you know it) with Advil and time, but there are herbal approaches too. My guess is that Daddy has (yet another) sprain right now, since it’s the bony area of his right wrist and now his left ankle.

Right after I turned 21, I discovered I had insomnia while snowed in playing Trivial Pursuits with friends before exams. The question for me was, How long does the average American take to fall asleep? The answer was multiple choice, all of the choices were under 20 minutes, and IIRC the correct answer was 7 minutes. My answer for me at that time was 2 hours, pretty consistently, for as long as I could recall. Years of grad school, especially later with the time demands of grad school and a full-time job, trimmed that down to 30 minutes. Nowadays, even that would be a long time to fall asleep for me. How did I do it?Like everyone, I started with the standard suggestions for insomnia, also called good sleep hygiene. For further research, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

What works for me from the standard suggestions are a sleep mask / eye shield to block light and white noise from a fan. If there’s any ambient light, I can’t sleep without covering my eyes. I first starting sleeping with a fan on when I was an undergrad living in a dorm that was noisy all night. I used the fan to block the distracting sounds. In addition to insomnia, I’m also a light sleeper. Not the best combination! Back then, if I woke up, even just to pee, I needed yet another 2 hours to fall asleep again. Now I’m conditioned: fan on means fall asleep, using the bathroom in the dark means fall asleep as soon as I’m back to my pillow. If I’m not falling asleep now, going to the bathroom in the dark can help. What a change from when that was a guarantee to wake me up!

In addition, I have some of my own tricks, most learned when I was pregnant the first time. First of all, I need enough pillows to be perfectly comfortable in a neutral position. I can’t fall asleep on my back, and I sure was not going to pick up tummy sleeping while pregnant! I have bursitis in my right hip, so I sleep on my left side. [The thought of bursitis in my left hip terrifies me!] I have a contoured pillow supporting my head and neck so that my upper spine is straight. When I’m not pregnant and I have a figure, I have a pillow under my waist to keep my lower spine straight and aligned. I have another pillow between my knees to keep my legs parallel to prevent strain on my hips. I sometimes put a long body pillow between my knees to hug so that my left shoulder moves forward instead of getting compressed. The waist pillow is only the second-best tip in this pile of pillows; the best tip is the neutral position. Once I learned how to feel when my hips were aligned, with the right hip neither higher (closer to my head) nor farther forward than the left hip, most of my sleep issues vanished. I didn’t think I was in (that much) pain, but a non-twisted well-aligned sleeping position has made an enormous difference.

Another gem that is nearly impossible to follow now that I have kids but has made a huge difference is to go to sleep the very first time I feel sleepy. The little voice that says I’m tired is very, very quiet in me. However, if I listen closely and go to bed then, I fall asleep quickly and sleep very well. If I ignore that voice, I get a strong second wind and have trouble falling asleep. If I’m watching TV, I tape it; the sports game or the show is more fun to watch when I’m well rested. If I’m working on a project, I’ll be happier to pick it up in the morning when I feel happy about being well rested. Really, everything will still be there in the morning after a good night’s sleep!

I do have to tell my brain to shut up most nights (unless I heeded that little voice about bedtime). I clear my mind and refuse to think; that helps. GTD helps in general, as does keeping a PDA next to the bed so I can write down whatever is on my mind and go back to the blank mind with a clear conscience, knowing that I will remember to pick up that thought when I check my PDA in the morning. I don’t think I’m anxious, but I understand that not being able to fall asleep because the brain is too busy tends to a sign of anxiety. Since GTD helps, I can’t really argue otherwise except to say I don’t think I feel anxious.

I can’t fall asleep if I have cold feet. Once I learned that tip from my mother, I was amazed how effective it was! The first time, I could actually feel myself falling asleep just as my head touched the pillow, while I could feel waves of warmth from my slippers. I have some trouble falling asleep if my feet are hot, but cold feet make it almost impossible to fall asleep. Either one of those can be an indication of needing more exercise, to get the blood flowing properly so those extremities are not too hot or too cold.

Contrary to the established suggestions, I find exercise right before bed does help; in fact, if I can’t sleep, I get up to do my evening exercise routine. However, I’m not doing heart-pumping cardiovascular fitness, or even sweat-inducing strength training. All the way at the other end of the exercise spectrum, I’m doing static stretching for flexibility. It gets the blood moving freely, lungs open, head cleared, with body relaxed and aligned. I usually work from Brill’s The Core Program, and add in some of my stand-by static stretches. That routine relaxes me so much that I’m ready to fall asleep; as a bonus, it makes it easier for me to find that neutrally-aligned position in my nest of pillows.

Health, Personal