Left Behind

This is the third consecutive day in which I have felt 'like crap' due to what I can only attribute as being ill slept. When I rise in the wee a.m. for my therapeutic outings to benefit my damaged right leg, I have extreme difficulty getting further sleep once I get back to bed.

It was the case again last night that I checked the time well ahead of my 3 a.m. alarm, so I rose then. However, I can no longer recall if it was a little before or after 2:30 a.m.

I was certain that my wife was home because earlier I had wanted to use the bathroom and I saw the hallway light outside my bedroom door to be on, and it is she who generally leaves it so to facilitate her passage from her bedroom to the kitchen or her youngest son's den area, both of which are downstairs.

But one of the others must have turned the darned thing on ─ my younger brother, Bev, or my youngest stepson.

I was extremely annoyed at Bev last evening before and right after I had gone to bed. She gets plastered on her white wine and then will sometimes foul up whatever the settings are on the remote and her T.V. in the bedroom she shares with my brother.

I had watched my show for the evening, and seen that he was unconscious downstairs and she was shut up in their bedroom.

Twice before I went to bed and was still seated here at my bedside computer in my closed bedroom, she emerged from her bedroom and stood calling loudly to my besotted brother who was utterly oblivious to her because of the volume at which she had left the living room T.V. when she came upstairs to use her own.

She could have gone downstairs to rouse him, but she was too drunkenly enfeebled to want to risk the stairs. So she just stood there calling out futilely.

Well, after I had gone to bed and was trying to sleep, she was a third time outside my bedroom door at the top of the stairway, calling out to my brother with no effect.

Later I heard him come upstairs to use the toilet, and then he went back downstairs. She much have heard him going back downstairs, so she came forth yet again to call to him. This time he responded, and came back upstairs.

It seems that the hopeless nitwit had possibly done something that no longer allowed her to change channels; and she could not lower the T.V. volume. Possibly she was even unable to turn the T.V. off

The woman can be so damned dense ─ for Pete's sake, the T.V. is her own, and she has had it for years!

In any event, I had gotten to bed well before 10:30 a.m., I believe; and I did eventually get to sleep, but I somewhat needed to use the toilet around or shortly after 1 a.m. But realizing that the hallway light was on and not wishing to have to dress just to use the toilet, I remained in bed and stifled the slight urge ─ which is never conducive to relaxation for sleep.

Possibly that is why I was again awake well before my 3 a.m. alarm.

I had my walk to the elementary school playground maybe ¼ mile away. The night was rather chilly but dry; and there was a great swath of white cloud all across the norther sky, but all was perfectly clear everywhere else.

I found the playground equipment to be dry, but unpleasantly cold to the hands. Still, I performed better than I have ever since my March 1st knee accident that laid me up for several weeks and curtailed all exercising.

With a 30-count between sets, I led off with two pull-ups on one of the jungle gym monkey bars, then a single pull-up in a second set. In the two sets of chin-ups that came next, I managed a chin-up in each of those sets. But over at the gymnastics-style rings, in both sets I could not get my upper arms above the horizontal. However, even that latter failure was breaking a record, for I have so far till then been fortunate to even manage to get my feet off the ground ─ often I have not managed to.

Then back to the monkey bars where I performed a pull-up between two of them, and then at lowering myself I held a dead hang for a 50-count. I mainly quit because the skin of my hands felt as if it was getting close to breaking or tearing ─ most odd. Maybe it was a consequence of the cold metal?

I was not quite done. As the night before, I went over to a pair of metal bars that angle up at a 40º - 45º angle to where a platform for a children's fort is, and I tried squatting like I managed to do the night before.

This time I was able to rise up again with the assist of the bars. I repeated with four more flat-footed squats, lowering till my butt was barely above ground.

This entire session was most encouraging! I have managed nothing like it since my accident.

After getting back home, I spent some while at my computer before getting to bed possibly no later than 5:10 a.m. One thing I discovered at my computer was that ─ in checking my wife's Facebook ─ yesterday and today she has been over on Vancouver Island with her friend Ui.

One location I could identify ─ but only because of the restaurant's sign ─ was them hanging out at Thai Pinto Restaurant in Chemainus. They may have spent a lot of time in that area, including at some barnacle- and muscle-covered rocky seashore.

At least one of us gets out and has fun. But normally she has Wednesday as a full workday at the Thai restaurant where she is employed part-time, so I don't know how it is that she has justified the trip by taking off on that day.

Nevertheless, it is her life.

I now cannot remember, but my morning may have commenced ahead of 8 a.m. However it may be, by 9 a.m. I had claimed possession of the T.V. because my brother was tardy in emerging from his bedroom. When he did, I was all set to play (via our Android TV Box) a 1¼-hour (1:16:30) video streamed yesterday to YouTube's Redacted channel: Is this World War 3? India and Pakistan are now at war, Pakistan vows massive response | Redacted.

I next tuned back in the video we had cut from quite early into it yesterday, but my brother was against watching any more of it, and I was okay with that due to its length and admittedly dry content. Notwithstanding, I will identify it in case it piques your interest.

At over 2¾ hours (2:47:06), the 1988 feature had been uploaded April 9, 2023, to YouTube's Cool World channel: CC Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media | Documentary. If I lived alone and had the whole days and nights to myself, I would have watched it all.

So I tuned in a YouTube compilation of short clips that totalled over an hour of the "moments you must see to believe" category, but overall it was a serious waste of time. I won't bother with such again, nor waste further time trying to locate the video to properly cite it.

My brother retreated for bed rest after that final video was done; I scrounged up a fast meal which I ate here at my bedside computer, and was thereafter into bed for a needed nap.

It was not long enough, alas.

I believed that I could have sunned, but my brother was still home and soon got deeply involved in mowing the front and back lawns. Then around 3 p.m. he left to catch a bus to go social drinking.

By then I discovered that the sky was completely covered with a haze that had largely obscured the Sun. And the online weather forecast implies an overcast Friday with some rain happening Saturday through to next Thursday.

Late in the afternoon after lying down for maybe near an hour due to a serious decline, I visited the backyard tool shed to use a pair of ladder-like aids that I have suspended from rafters, easing myself down into a full squat as I had done early this a.m. at the school playground. I think I engaged another five such squats.

Then I climbed so as to be able to perform a dead hang, holding it for a 50-count.

Also, I later had a little exercise in my wife's vacant bedroom, and again managed to support myself awkwardly a couple of times to squat almost to the floor, holding it the second time for a 100-count.

My lower quadriceps are far too atrophied (with adhesions) to allow anything of the sort without exceptional assistance from my hands gripping supports in both the lowering and the rising, but it is all groundbreaking compared to what I have been limited to. Maybe within the week I will be able to start alternating careful steps in going downstairs instead of having to put each foot on every single step before ascending to the next one as is the present situation.

Enough blogging for now at 7:45 p.m. I am going to have a very tiny supper, and then watch something here on my bedside computer while enjoying a Cariboo Malt (7.9% alcohol).

🟣🟣🟣

After 8:30 p.m. arrived with my brother still absent, I shut myself into my bedroom and located a source for FBI ─ episode 11 ("No One Left Behind") of season six. As usual, very good entertainment.

I envy character "OA" Zidan's girlfriend as played by the exceptionally attractive blonde actress Comfort Clinton. It was largely the closing scene where she brings needed solace to "OA" that most affected me emotionally, lost romantic that I am; although equally touching in its own fashion was the devoted loyalty displayed by three ranking servicemen who sacrificed everything to bring back a fellow soldier still held captive by Taliban in Afghanistan.

I envy that degree of devotion that non-blood 'mere' friends can have for one another.

I held myself to the one can of beer, incidentally. But I am beginning to consider having a four-litre box of wine to tap when something more may be desired. I only wish that wine still came in great jugs, for all of us in one means or another ingest far too much plastic.

If interested in the episode, my first source crapped out at the 13-minute mark, but a second source ─ this TVids.net link ─ played through from that point flawlessly.

Upon peeking forth from my bedroom soon past 9:30 p.m. when the show was done, I could see that the T.V. downstairs was off and the living room in darkness, and Bev shut up in the bedroom with her T.V. playing ─ in other words, my idiot socially needy brother was still not home.

I think that has changed as I type these words at 9:50 p.m., for someone entered the house maybe five minutes back.

But upon daring a final visit to the toilet, I see that it must have been my youngest stepson ─ he had left this morning before I went downstairs at 9 a.m., and he remained away till now.

My brother is going to be stewed to the gills, the drunkard, so I am not going to have anything to do with him. Even Bev has shut off her T.V. and evidently gone to bed.

It is now 10:02 p.m., and I shall start closing shop for the day and getting to bed ─ my 3 a.m. cellphone alarm set yet again.