Thursday, January 18, 2018

As one of the side effects of my myriad conditions, I suffer from insomnia. I have battled it since at least the 1980's and it got worse when I got fibromyalgia. Now it raises its ugly head about one day (or night) out of three. I went through wrangles with the pharmaceutical control board who decided, in their infinite wisdom and lack of knowledge of my conditions, that I didn't need my sleeping pills any more. Had there been an alternative that worked I gladly would have taken it but I haven't found one yet. Now that I'm back of the original dosage, I can hope to sleep sometimes. Tonight's not one of them. I hope to sleep before 7AM.

In the battle with awakeness, I have learned how to drink hard liquor, or spirits as they are called here. I was never able to drink straight spirits until recently and I eased into it, first trying single malt scotchs until I found several I liked (all expensive). I've also found some types of bourbon, tequila, and small batch rums that are quite tasty drunk straight. Mind you I never drink very much. Maybe two fingers (of something expensive) at a time. (Tonight it's a small batch Bundaberg rum which I think I bought as duty free.) I used to be exclusively a white wine drinker. Then the Bear and I became home brewers and made damn fine British style ales and porters. When he became diabetic we stopped that. I still drink craft beer when I have it and I've even found one brand of Swedish cider I like. When J comes to visit we often have a bottle of wine open or share a bottle of cider (it comes in big bottles).

I try, as has been mentioned before to have a BBBB -- big boring bedtime book, that is designed to turn my brain off and let me sleep. That book at the moment is Tories about Loyalists/Royalists during the Revolutionary War. I was wondering if any of my ancestors were in their number, aside from David Hotchkiss who emigrated to Canada around 1800 and fought for the British in the War of 1812. But so far the book is at a higher level than individuals unless they were someone important. It's interesting at any rate to find out how the colonial population was split and that in some ways it was a civil war although the British viewed it as uppity rebels taking up arms against their betters.They didn't let the Tories fight against the American rebels unless they had already been commissioned in the British Army.

I am feeling very stupid for letting myself get talked into a scam last week because I was having difficulty with the functionality of an app on my iPad. Foolishly I connected to a service provider (using the term very loosely) who insisted I was suffering from a security breach on my laptop when my laptop was fine and I ended up forking over several hundred dollars for remedies that they promised would solve my problem. It didn't because it wasn't a security breach but a bug in the app I was trying to use and they couldn't fix it at all. I felt very stupid after I poked around and found the company was linked to reports of scams but I followed J's advice and left bad reviews every place I could and miraculously I got a refund of those hundreds of dollars. NEVER agree to pay anybody large sums of money without doing research about the company. I was stupid and I'll never do that again.

J and I are in a spasm of automotive lust. This is not a new phenomenon for me, as I loved cars since I was a small child, but now I know a lot more, through watching shows on Foxtel, and reading books and magazines about cars, their relative merits, lusting after expensive supercars like Lamborghinis and Bugattis and learning about the finer points of paddle shifting and naturally aspirated v-12 engines. I'll never afford any of these $100K+ beauties. If I am forced to trade in my Mazda 3 it will only be because I need a bigger car to transport an a\electric mobility scooter.