The day of the big storms has come and gone, and I truly don’t mean to brag when so many others are suffering, but in my little corner of the world it has been pretty much a non-event, and for that I am happy.
In other parts of the state, people did not have it so easy, and I feel for them. Even in other parts of the Portland metro area there was flooding.
But here in little old Wood Village, we got some heavier-than-normal rain, and as far as I know now, that was about all.
The phone company repair tech made it here yesterday before I got home from work, so I had phone service and my DSL connection back last night. (Thank you, Frontier!)
The lights never even flickered once. Our utilities are underground at the condos I live in, but that wire has to come up for air somewhere, and beyond that point it is just as vulnerable as any other power line.
In accommodation to the then approaching storm, I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from work Thursday night instead of Friday night and bought a bit more of some things than I otherwise would have. Such as a spare 8-pack of alkaline batteries for my battery-operated lantern.
It was only after I got home that I thought about my boom box AM/FM radio, sitting atop a bookcase in my dining room. Normally it is plugged into the house AC current, but it does have a compartment for a large number of “C” cell batteries. I don’t have nearly as many of them as it would require if Portland General Electric (the power company here) went south.
Considering that if the power did go out, that radio (powered by those batteries that I don’t have) would be my only source of news from the outside world, not thinking to stock up on those batteries was a pretty major goof on my part. Luckily for me, the power stayed on, this time.
Memo to self: Next week, buy a box of “C” cell alkaline batteries!
I spent today (ho hum, how mundane) doing, among other things, part of the laundry that I would have done on Sunday, tomorrow. I figured that if the power went out I would at least have clean clothes to wear as I sat in the dark reading by the light of my lantern. 😉
My Sleep Apnea reared its ugly head along the way. Around mid-afternoon I began to feel the unmistakable yearning for a nap, and by four-thirty I had given in and was fast asleep in my living room chair.
It was after six PM when I woke up and came upstairs to my writing room and began writing this essay, which I will publish on Jazz For A Saturday Night tonight in lieu of the review I have been procrastinating on for three weeks.
Speaking of my Sleep Apnea, I am at the moment hard-pressed to see a lot of change in the two and a half months since I began using the mouthpiece. Some days I seem to notice a considerable difference, other days there seems to be no difference at all.
For two days (or rather nights) last week a remarkable change happened: I woke up both mornings-after with the realization that I had slept the whole night through without waking up even once!
It has been so long since that has happened that I couldn’t even begin to guess when it was.
As with so many things in life, this decidedly good even presented itself to me with both good and bad aspects. When I woke up the first morning and realized it actually was morning and not the middle of the night, my first thought was one of celebration. “Hooray! I slept all night and didn’t wake up once!” But then the greater implication came to me. “Crap! Its time to get up already!”
I cherish the memory of those two nights. They have not been repeated since. Not yet, at least.
One fact that has recently become obvious to me is how widespread Sleep Apnea is.
A friend of mine has it.
One of my neighbors has it.
A guy I work with at the day job has it.
Another guy who works for one of our service providers and who I see only once a month when he calls on us has it in a really bad way.
A guy who works for one of our customers and who I speak with several times a week has it.
And the service technician who was here in my condo last Wednesday to give my furnace its annual routine maintenance has it.
And those are just the ones I am aware of. Undoubtedly there are more that I am not aware of, especially at the day job. Between forty and fifty people work there, mostly guys. No offense, ladies, but Sleep Apnea victims are far more likely to be male than female. Count yourselves lucky.
Sleep apnea is quite likely the number one underappreciated medical disorder in this country. Underappreciated is not the right word for that sentence but it will have to do for now.
I just remembered that my bed is covered with laundry that needs to be folded and put away, and here it is almost eight o’clock and I still have not had dinner yet.
::sigh::
Thank you for reading this.
Al Evans
Wood Village, Oregon
jazz for a saturday night 