Last night's sleep was not good.
I had gotten to bed early enough ─ probably not too very long after 10:30 p.m. But early in the evening, I had lain abed in rest far longer than I intended after blogging for the day ─ I had surely fallen asleep.
As a consequence, sleep refused to visit me so soon thereafter. And when at last it did settle upon me, it was brief. I was laying awake when I heard my younger brother shut his bedroom door after finally deciding to give up T.V. ─ and a peek at the time revealed it to be 12:22 a.m.
And then I was beset with a bout of coughing ─ I am still recuperating from a flu that seized me back on January 14. I bore with it until I had to conclude that it was not likely to abate on its own, so I rose and came here to the computer that I keep in the small room immediately next to my bedroom.
I figured to begin laying the foundation for a new post at one of my six hosted websites, and I had some water to assuage my throat with periodically.
Anon, I heard my wife finally arriving home after her long day working at her friend's Thai restaurant. She expressed her surprise upon seeing me not in bed, and wondered if I was once more feeling unwell.
I explained that I still felt proper enough; rather, I just happened to become possessed of a prolonged coughing fit that could not be managed from bed.
She wasn't yet ready to seek bed, and was soon busy downstairs fixing herself a small meal that she would thereafter spend time eating at the dining table while probably fixating on her cellphone's screen.
She had presented that she was going to have to work the full day today ─ usually, she has only had to begin working late in the afternoon on Fridays.
When at last she did get herself to bed, I wound up what I was involved with, and then I soon joined her ─ my coughing spell had long subsided by this time.
I am not going to elucidate as to why, but I had to quell some emotion to avoid becoming too upset to find sleep.
Sleep did come.
And then I became aware that my wife had gotten up ─ I must have been primarily conscious. I thought that she had gone to the bathroom, so I decided to get up and get dressed and return to work on that new post's foundation.
But she had gone downstairs ─ and her eldest son was also up, readying for his workday.
She was not long, and then she returned to bed.
It is odd that I have no recollection of the time all of this occurred, but it had to have been well ahead of 6:30 a.m.
I think recollection is amiss because I felt so poorly-slept ─ I feel of late that I am running on a deficit of sleep.
I finished the task at hand; and then before yet 8:30 a.m. had bedded down on the floor in front of my computer to spare disturbing my wife's vital sleep.
I set my cellphone's alarm for 9:59 a.m. to ensure that she did not oversleep, for her start time at the restaurant would be 11:00 a.m., and it is a bit of a drive.
When the alarm sounded, I fell dreadful, but I got myself up from the floor. And upon emerging from this room, I saw that my wife was already up and in the bathroom.
There was naught to do but go downstairs and boil up some water for my day's first hot caffeinated beverage, and to have the water at ready for when my wife came downstairs to fix up a hot drink to take with her when she left around 10:30 a.m.
Of course, my younger brother was already watching T.V.
I joined him, taking over by employing our T9 Android 8.1 TV Box to summon some shows. He doesn't know how to use it, and otherwise must settle on the banal fare offered via our T.V.'s basic cable package.
I was to become agitated, though. I find myself feeling as if I am in bondage to my helpless younger brother's entertainment needs, and it began to make me extremely resentful as the time dragged on.
I could have returned to my proper bed at my wife's departure, but I instead felt compelled to babysit my brother. It is always a matter of watching enough T.V. until he feels like seeking bedrest to restore himself so that he can take off for the afternoon and end up drinking somewhere.
And then he will be back home to watch more T.V. all evening.
I don't mind enduring some of the latter morning sitting on my butt doing this for him, but he just kept prolonging the ordeal. It was not until just after 1:00 p.m. that he finally announced that he was set to go and "stretch out."
I was so burned out that I was useless to do anything else but seek my own nap, further wasting my afternoon.
Plainly put, I am not getting things done. I have websites to work on ─ this is a desperate matter for me. It is also one reason why I sleep so damned badly ─ the only time I can get any website work done is extremely early in the morning before he gets up.
Blogging usurps my afternoons ─ I have no time to spare for my websites.
I am also being robbed of time and opportunities to get in any exercise.
Due to how short on sleep I have felt today, this has really fuelled my ire. My brother may not have anything better to do than watch hours of T.V. in the early part of the day, then go off and booze it up, and then watch more hours of T.V. in the evening after he comes home; but I am a casualty of his useless retirement lifestyle.
And he almost boasts of being a technological Luddite, when in truth he is too dense and brain-dead from years of excessive drinking to be able to fathom how to operate a computer or even our Android TV Box.
I have become in thralldom to his helplessness in this regard, guilted into serving his entertainment needs for bloody hours almost every day.
My own wants and desires be damned.
Well, this isn't the post I had I planned to be composing. As I said, I am extremely short on sleep, and it is obviously taking its toll.
Adding to the day's exasperation is that when I emerged from my bedroom following my reasonably short afternoon nap, my brother was still in his own room!
Yet he's the one who spent eight hours in bed overnight. It just seems so wretchedly unfair.
It's been a wet day. The light rain began last evening, and must not have ever ceased. But I'm fine with it.
I had meant to link to an article showcasing in exaggerated fashion a recent study review that concluded that heart failure patients do not necessarily benefit from restricting their dietary salt intake.
The article I wanted to link to arrived to me by E-mail on January 19, but I cannot find the article published at its source (JacksDailyDose.com).
It seems that I am going to have to reproduce it in full:
BEAT Heart Failure in STYLE!Heart failure. You'd think the news couldn't possibly get any worse than that.But then... right after you get hit with that horrifying diagnosis... it happens.It gets WORSE!The same doc who breaks the news about your failing heart will follow it up with the kind of "help" that'll do two bad things at once.1) It WILL ruin your life.2) It WON'T extend it.He'll urge you to cut back on salt dramatically, and maybe that's the real reason half of all heart failure patients are dead in five years.It's not because of the disease itself, where your heart struggles to pump out blood.It's because after suffering through bland meal after a bland meal on a low-sodium diet... after being sentenced to a lifetime of slop worse than prison food... you'll start to WISH for death!Well, friend, it's time to live again.You DON'T have to sacrifice good taste to protect your heart as the latest research reveals exactly how much science is behind that low-salt recommendation for heart failure patients.NONE!The new review of decades of science finds few gold-standard studies on sodium restriction for heart failure. All of them were so small they were practically worthless, and all of them had a risk of bias.Even then, the combined data from all of those studies found:
- NO reduction in death.
- NO reduction in heart disease.
- NO reduction in hospitalization.
- NO impact on the length of hospital stay when admitted.
Just two studies found the low-sodium diet led to an improvement in heart function, but they were canceled out by two studies that found NO CHANGE AT ALL in heart function.Yet this diet is STILL pushed on heart failure patients!Millions of Americans are struggling through miserable meals every day for no darned reason.And it's not just heart failure patients.Studies have consistently found no benefit to quitting salt for other common heart problems.In some cases, cutting back on salt can lead to WORSE outcomes, including a HIGHER risk of death!Of course, you can get too much. Packaged foods and take-out are made of salt, and if you eat that junk, of course, you'll get too much.Stick to your own home-cooked meals, add salt to taste and you'll have nothing to worry about.And if you're looking for REAL help with heart failure, forget cutting salt... and boost omega-3s instead! A study last year found fish oil supplements can cut the risk of death in heart failure patients by 10 percent.Get some from a capsule, and some from a salmon dinner.Just don't forget to sprinkle some salt on it!
I managed to locate a couple of other articles reporting on the same study review:
Helio.com
Health.Harvard.edu
Neither has quite the enthusiasm as the article that I reproduced. Nevertheless:
"We found no clinically relevant data on whether reduced dietary salt intake affected outcomes such as cardiovascular-associated or all-cause mortality, cardiovascular-associated events, hospitalization, or length of hospital stay," the authors report.
That quote is from yet another article I located, but which requires a subscription to access. As a result, I did not intend to link to it, but since I used a quote from it for the first part of this post's title, I feel obligated to offer the link ─ the article is at Medscape.com and titled Benefit of Salt Restriction in Heart Failure Uncertain.
Concerning dietary salt, none of us should be bothering with table salt, and even lots of sea salt is contaminated with plastic particles. Himalayan salt is 100% plastic free.
Concerning dietary salt, none of us should be bothering with table salt, and even lots of sea salt is contaminated with plastic particles. Himalayan salt is 100% plastic free.
Okay, another article that I want to link to involves oil pulling ─ a practice we all should engage in on a daily basis:
LifeSpa.com
I object to the claim in the article that brushing one's teeth with coconut oil is only marginally helpful, but I make that objection with my own self as the exception.
You see, I take about 15 minutes to brush my teeth, so in that time the oil would have been "partially-digested" anyway. I even swish the oil about in my mouth afterward for another minute or two before expectorating it into a garden plot out in our front yard.
Folks who only spend a minute or two 'flash-brushing' their teeth clearly wouldn't benefit very much.
Okay, on to another topic ─ some Bali photos. Or at least I think they were taken in Bali.
My wife and her two sons had arranged a small reunion there with five of their Thailand family members quite late in January last year.
I have the photos in a Google Photos album.
Today, Google Photos notified me that it created a collage of some of them to celebrate this day (February 1) back in 2018:
And here are the original photos. Note that I think that this one was actually used twice in that collage, and it was probably taken on February 2 (2018):
This is my wife ─ one of two selfies in the collage:
This next photo was also likely taken on February 2, 2018:
And this is the second selfie by my wife:
And now I must take my leave and commence work on a post at my private blog where I can name names and say so very much more than I can in this public blog I was forced to create recently.
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