Category: life

When the thing that fixes you breaks

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I’ve complained about this a couple of times, but my CPAP has been making this godawful whining noise every time I inhale lately, and over the course of the night it gets louder and louder until I unplug the hose from the back of the thing and plug it back in, at which point the process repeats itself. I thought I had come up with a way to minimize if not fix it, but I’m fairly certain I got no more than half an hour of sleep last night, including when I gave up on sleeping in bed and went into the living room to my Comfy Chair to try and follow my body into taking a nap. Which didn’t work.

I don’t remember how I slept before I had this thing; it is entirely possible that I never actually did, but one way or another I can’t sleep without it now. So I finally gave up this morning and, after burning in my very last sick day for the year, because no one deserves me on half an hour of sleep, I figured out who I was supposed to call to talk about warranties and replacements and repairs and a bunch of other shit I didn’t really know anything about.

Turns out a “lightly used” reconditioned CPAP was only $150 and will be here tomorrow, so I went with that option. “Lightly used” means under a thousand hours; mine has nearly seven thousand hours of use, and it comes with a year warranty, so … yeah. I’m tasking my wife with waking me up in the morning, putting in earplugs, and taking a couple of Tylenol PM before going to bed tonight, so hopefully I can get enough sleep that I’m at least able to function tomorrow.

And if I can’t? Oh well. I’m going in anyway. There’s twelve days of school left. It’ll be fine.

Not tonight

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Got some bad news on the Clark Kent side of things, and I have been in a towering rage since 11:30 this morning. I am unfit for human company at the moment and so we’re gonna take the night off again.

Taking tonight off

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I have a book I want to finish and I haven’t hung out with my son in a while, so no bloggery tonight. See y’all tomorrow.

My mom says I’m funny

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This was on my board on Friday, which was the last catch-up day until the final. I passed out progress reports at the beginning of class and went to my desk.

Spent the day running around town– as a family, no less– and getting stuff done and possibly spending some money unnecessarily. Then I came home and built a Lego set. I’m going to play video games for an hour now and then do some reading, so this is pretty much the perfect Saturday. We drove past a protest downtown, too, and the boy’s reaction to it makes me think I should probably take him to one sometime soon.

(I am … ambivalent, at best, about the utility of public protests, especially in 2025. That doesn’t mean that I look down at people for participating in them; I definitely don’t, but I don’t know that I find it a useful way to spend my time. There may be a post in there somewhere; I should probably interrogate the idea more.)

Anyway. What are you doing with yourself this weekend? I would like to officially plan as much of the next three weeks as humanly possible tomorrow, so spending the whole day at my desk is definitely possible.

I am not sure …

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… how it is somehow nearly 9:00, or why I’m not chewing my own arm off since I never had dinner, or any number of other things. I do know that I spent way too much time playing The First Berzerker: Khazan today, and that I have consumed enough caffeine to kill a lesser mortal today and am still absurdly tired.

I did say that I wanted superpowers; “metabolizes caffeine at superspeed” was not what I meant.

Going to bed early

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I’ve been asleep in a chair for about an hour and a half, and fuck it, I’m going to check off the handful of Things I Do Every Day and call it a night.

Still beat

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Sorry to do this two days in a row, but last night my CPAP machine shit the bed on me, making a tiny, high-pitched noise every time I exhaled that proved completely impossible to ignore, and so I tried to go without it, because the noise it was making was keeping both of us from sleeping?

Yeah. I can’t go back. I got maybe twenty minutes of good sleep last night. Maybe.

I’m going to tear the thing apart, clean every bit of it, put it back together, replace every single part I have a spare for, and go to bed, and if it starts singing the song of its people at me again I might cry until I’m actually dead.

(That’s not me in the picture. Probably obvious, but still.)

I’m beat

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Today didn’t exactly suck, but much in line with yesterday it was an extremely long day without having anything actually bad happen. I’m going to go beat a boss in Khazan and then call it a night, which means I’ll spend an hour getting my ass kicked and then turn the game off in frustration and not fall asleep until midnight.

Whee!