The previous two evenings have found my younger brother more or less able to sustain consciousness throughout those evenings after he was home from wherever he had been drinking.
As a result, I ended up operating our T9 Android 8.1 TV Box into the midnight hour, since I am the only one of us who understands its operation.
We use the device to find episodes of the hundred or more T.V. shows that we follow.
On both occasions, I drank two cans of the strong (8% alcohol) beer that I keep in stock.
What was unfortunate about both of those evenings was that my wife had come home after my brother and I were watching our shows, but I was unable to have the discussion of our financial plight with her that I have been wanting to have.
This discussion is wholly private ─ my brother cannot know aught of any of its intended details. So with him present, my hands were tied.
However, since I also had to operate the Android TV Box, I was doubly tied up. And it was not as if I could simply pause the play of one of the episodes my brother and I were watching in order for me to avoid missing out on the episode.
The Android TV Box does allow for pausing; however, that would of course just alert my brother to the important discussion he is not to be privy to in any degree.
It was all distinctly chafing.
She has had to work at her friend's Thai restaurant both yesterday and today with 11:00 a.m. starts, so once she is gone late into the morning, there are no further opportunities to speak with her.
My brother does not normally go anywhere until the early afternoon, but he did go out this morning at 10:00 a.m. to take his van somewhere to have some work done on it.
Notwithstanding this opportunity, I did not wish to suddenly dump financial woes upon my wife just ahead of her leaving for the day to drive to work, and so I held my tongue.
The odds are against my brother retaining consciousness this evening ─ three consecutive such evenings are most unlikely. If he does flake out, I won't be sitting up after he passes out. I wash my hands of him once he surrenders to his drunken oblivion.
Thus, whichever way the evening plays out, I will not be having any discussions with my wife. If I retire due to my brother's drunken unconsciousness, she will not be home before I go to bed.
A fallout of the previous two late evenings has been that I have been unable to get up during the night to work on the next day's content assignment at the post I am constructing at one of my six hosted websites.
Due to this, I have had to tackle the assignments after rising in the morning. This worked out well enough this morning, since my brother went off at 10:00 a.m. to have the work done on his van.
However, normally at 10:00 a.m. on weekdays, I join him where he has been watching T.V. in the living room and ─ after assuming operation of our Android TV Box ─ I spare him having to settle for the banal fare that is available through the basic cable package that we subscribe to.
Due to having to undertake that role yesterday, I was unable to finish the day's content assignment until the afternoon. I also sunned that afternoon for well over an hour...and then succumbed to prolonged turpitude that effectively exhausted what remained of my afternoon.
What all of that meant was that I was unable to make my usual daily post in this blog.
My brother and I did watch an entertaining musical documentary yesterday that I had summoned up at 10:00 a.m. ─ I located it through the YouTube 'app' that is downloaded into our Android TV Box.
The 1984 documentary, however, can be found online elsewhere ─ one current source is the Web Archive.org: Rock and Roll: The Early Days.
As said, my day fell apart into the latter afternoon yesterday, so today is proceeding far better. For one thing, I don't have the demands upon my time that I did in the afternoon yesterday. Or at least, even though today became markedly sunny by midday, I am not possessed of the same compunction to get out and do any sunning.
One reason for that is because I would like to try and get out this afternoon to do some local grocery shopping ─ I had failed to do so two days ago after I had blogged of hoping to manage to get out to discharge that errand.
It is 3:45 p.m. as I type these words. My brother had sought some bed rest awhile after he had gotten back with his van, and I soon sought my own bed. Despite seeming to have slept unusually well overnight, I had difficulty getting myself to put a halt to this wonderful nap.
When I did rise, it seemed that my brother had already left again for the afternoon. But then I realized that he was outside in the backyard doing yard work.
I find that this tends to put him into an ill disposition. I had fixed myself a cup of instant coffee to help reinvigorate me; so when I had nearly finished it and then heard my brother coming into the house with his chores apparently done, I betook myself back into my bedroom and had some exercising with my 43½ dumbbell.
Meantime, he evidently sought some further bed rest.
I was seated here at my computer having my day's first meal when he produced himself once more ─ and in a decent mood ─ and announced that he was going to head off for the afternoon. It wasn't too much after 3:30 p.m. when he left.
A change of topic now.
Back in February, I contracted what I believe was the flu ─ either that, or it was an exceptionally strong cold.
Soon after I was pretty much over the worst, my left ear plugged up. I didn't fret much about it for the first several weeks, but I began getting too annoyed to bear with it any longer because it had gotten to the point where my hearing was badly impaired.
The hearing was a reduced as if I had an earplug deeply inserted into the ear.
The hearing was a reduced as if I had an earplug deeply inserted into the ear.
I found myself having to cup my bad ear in order to hear conversations on T.V., and even then it was troublesome. Obviously when someone said anything to me, I was at a loss sometimes to understand what had been said, but reluctant to own up to it.
I did research on how to try and unplug a blocked ear, and tried methods presented in some YouTube videos.
One procedure was to hold the nose and try to blow air out of it ─ but not too hard, for doing this does exert considerable pressure to the eardrum.
I tried this method quite a lot. And then one video featuring a young woman cautioned not to do it more than a few times at any one occasion ─ as I recall, maybe only two or three times.
She stressed that by constantly forcing the air through the Eustachian tube can actually 'blow out' or rupture the eardrum.
I now wonder if I might have done that ─ I don't think that there is always notable pain associated with the event. It can happen and the victim be quite unaware. Things like 'cotton swabs' (as in Q-tips) are renowned for doing this to eardrums. As Wikipedia says in that article, "The use of cotton swabs in the ear canal is one of the most common causes of perforated eardrum, a condition which sometimes requires surgery to correct."
Ultimately what I felt that I had to do to unblock the ear was to get the ingredients to concoct my own nasya oil, for I didn't feel myself able to afford actual nasya oil.
It probably fulfilled the intended purpose; and I still use the oil practically on a daily basis because it keeps the mucous in my nasal passageways soft ─ for years I have been prey to extreme drying of that material.
My left ear still does plug up when I have been lying down, but it readily enough unplugs once I am back erect.
One procedure that I find is worse than useless to me is to apply a droplet or two of nasya oil or even an essential oil like tea tree oil into the ear canal ─ the damned oil just clogs up my ear, and the sensation lasts for many hours.
But I got into this flu topic because I wanted to link to an article on elderberries ─ the article was reporting on some recent research that found elderberry consumption can block the flu virus from doing what the nasty germ is so effective at doing:
JacksDailyDose.com
I never realized that the berries could just be eaten as if they were any other kind of berry ─ I have never seen any for sale in any market I have ever been shopping in.
However, maybe they can't! Here are two further articles about that research concerning the berries' effectiveness against the flu virus ─ note that the first article does indicate that the fresh berries can be toxic when consumed in any quantity:
FoxNews.com
ScienceDaily.com
You can check out the results of an Amazon search I did at the bottom of this post using the term "elderberry." Heck, if I had the property, I wouldn't mind getting some live plants and growing my own berries!
I have one further article that I want to direct attention to ─ it has nothing to do with elderberries nor the flu.
Have you ever heard of biophotons? The following fairly short article almost seems to be entering into the field of the supernatural:
LifeSpa.com
Whenever I read material such as the above, I find myself almost fascinated...temporarily. Soon enough, I seem to forget all about it once my very limited reality manifests itself once more (and in very short order).
I am going to close today's post with a few photos that my wife took in early June 2018 when she had travelled to Italy to visit a sister of hers who basically lives there.
Although the photos' metadata indicates that these photos were taken on June 6, 2018, the camera's date setting had not been adjusted or updated for that trip.
I think that the photos were taken during an outing on my wife's first full day in Italy, so everything she saw was new and exciting.
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