Great News! I’ve managed to tweak out those emails some of you elect to get that notify you when someone replies to a blog you are watching. The new and improved email notifications will now send you to the nicely formated blog page you may have expected!

Show of hands, who here knows alot about dreams? I’m not talkin about dream analysis and what it means if you dream of a giant pasta dish scolding you in public … I mean the mechanics of dreams.

I actually know enough to be dangerous. I did some light research on it once or twice. As most people know, dreaming happens during the REM (rapid eye movement) cycle of sleep. What many don’t know is that REM is not the deepest part of sleep (as far as brain waves and what not is concerned). Also, REM usually happens many times in a night. REM usually occurs in ninety minute cycles throughout the night, and as the night progresses, these intervals of REM increase in length until finally, the last two hours of slumber contain a high percentage of REM.

In between REM are various other mind-states that are equally normal parts of sleep … some even ‘deeper’ than REM.

Anyhow … lately I’ve been waking up every hour to hour and half from intense dreams. And, it’s not the typical mid-sleep-wakings that happen normally and which we as sleepers have no recall of … this is the kind of waking that leaves you very actively awake and wondering if you’ll get back to sleep.

Thirty minutes or so later, I do fall back asleep … and about an hour later I’ll wake up again – wide awake – from another vivid dream.

Not only is this making it rather difficult to get a full nights sleep … I have to wonder WTF is up with my sleep cycle that I can so quickly and consistently drop all the way back to REM … only to be slapped awake such a short amount of time later. The dreams themselves don’t seem any shorter than typical dreams. (And for those of you who think dreams take place in the brain at something far faster than real time – that has been disproven … dream time is very close to real time.)

I’m beginning to wonder when the last time I made it past REM into really really deep sleep was. I mean I usually aim for 5-6 hours of sleep … I don’t have alot of buffer time to be screwing around with waking up and starting the cycle all over again.

I had 4-5 of these intense dream / wakings last night (and several dreams which were otherwise normal). One of these dreams involved me and a large group of people in an open air observatory at the sears tower (no such observatory actually exists). Suddenly there was this wind storm … like tornado level winds. The whole building was waving (which normally happens some – and is noticeable – but this was REALLY bad). It was one of those certain-death and why-am-I-the-only-one-who-realizes-it type of dreams.

The most disconcerting part of the dream however was that I was wearing a cowboy hat … that would NEVER happen in reality.

*shudder*

I’ll blog more later, but go read

Doug’s blog about my grandpa.

For those of you who hadn’t heard, my unfortunate family news last week was that my grand father passed away. Doug has tossed up a nice little blog about him. I’ll try to do the same later.

Everett C. Tarr (dougmeade.com)

(if you comment here, thank you, but please be sure to comment on Doug’s site too … he’s the one who went to all the trouble to write up a nice blog. )

Hey all.

Well I’m back in Chicago. I had to travel this weekend with news of some unexpected and unpleasant family issues.

I’m back.

I think I need to go to the doctor. I don’t really want to. I’ve been to ‘the doctor’ once in the past 6 years or so. I don’t even have a doctor. I’ll have to just pot-luck it. I’m not afraid of them or anything, I just rarely need them. I don’t go for things that I’m fairly sure is going to end with recommendations of over the counter medications and ‘taking it easy’.

Honestly, I tend to have two modes 1) crazy busy / super active and 2) sloth-like borderline apathetic ‘takin it easy’ … in the first case no advice to take it easy will be taken to heart and and the latter case it’s just not needed. I have plenty of over the counter medications at my disposal … so I just don’t go to the doctor very often.

But I’m a mess … maybe time to go make sure I’m not dying. I just don’t want to go.

Anyhow … I’ve a killer headache at the moment (naturally) and need to do laundry yet tonight (naturally) … so I’ll keep this short.

Work is likely to be CRAZY this week … not really looking forward to that either … but so far the lottery gods continue to smite me.

What a day.

It seems The Fates have conspired against me on every front today. I won’t go in to most of it but lets just accept that today has been extremely frustrating all day long.

For lunch I grabbed my voice recorder eager to make an Audio Lunch Hour as I walked and to try to salvage some good in the day … but The Fates would not allow even that simple pleasure.

But the crowning moment (so far) was when The Fates – not satisfied with merely my generally foul mood – decided to add insult to injury with … The Dribble Glass.

There I am minding my own business in Jimmy Johns, waiting for my sub, having taken my first enjoyable breath of relief all day, and I take a sip of my Diet Coke.

Unfortunately my cup had a faulty lid or something an diet coke poured down the front my shirt. I just stood there – a spectacle – and noded as I offered a defeated “of course” to The Fates.

As if the act itself isn’t bad enough I now have – on my nice white shirt – a cola colored trail of evidence from my chin to my belt for everyone else to enjoy and ask about for the rest of this miserable day.

/sigh

One day … one day I’m going to win the lottery and I’m going to have so much money and free time that not even The Fates will be able to ruin me … one day.

Maybe I’ll put up a pay-pal donations button or something … ah who am I kidding – it’s pulling teeth just to get the ‘the regulars’ here to comment on a blog.

stupid day … STUPID DRIBBLE GLASS!!

Well, I’m back to work today. I took a sick day on Monday to help recover a bit from the killer mutant space virus that was trying to destroy me one sneeze at a time.

So I’m playing catch up today and have a bunch of meetings. I have about 2 minutes here before my next one so I thought I’d blog real quick. (I’ll try to do a lunch hour today too … it’s been a while).

Until then be sure to be surfing The Triad – some good stuff lately.

News from around the Triad:

• Ken & Tiphani get married!
  

• Doug gets a root canal
  

• Kevin gives in to Jackson Mania
  

• Taylor makes the papers!

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Evenin’ all … It’s 12:30am Saturday night, and I’m at the office.

Naturally I’d rather not be here, but it’s one of those things that has to be done every now and again in IT. Sometimes something happens off hours that needs you to be there.

The down side is … I’m also sick. I started to get sick on Friday. It’s gotten worse most of today (Saturday) … and I’m not real optomistic about Sunday.

Anyhow I’m here and wanted to blog and pretend you were up and reading and thus somehow here in spirit.

The good news is as I’m forced to be at a computer waiting for nothing to happen (I hope) … I did manage to FINALLY fix the redirect problems that we were having. I’m very sorry it took so long. I’m writing up a plan on what I have to do to move everything nicely to another hoster in case that becomes needed … I dont ever want to have to go thorugh that much break-fix on the site again.