Sleep Clinic

These wee pears are Red Sensation Bartlets. I love the beginning of the life of fruit where it's just beginning to swell, right at the first moment it looks like something you recognize as a future salad ingredient and not just a blown flower.

This lovely nonremontant rose is called Rosa Mundi and is a very old specimen. It is kin with the Apothecary Rose which was one of the first recorded rose species. I will try to get myself another Apothecary Rose as I had to leave one behind in California. It's really not surprising that I am attracted to these roses. They are much more suited to medicinal purposes than modern hybrid roses. Particularly because of their rose hip production which is much stronger and the strong scent of the flower.

When I was a plucky fifteen year old I went through a brief phase of eating roses with my other plucky friend named Jenny. I really don't know what made us do it. We ate roses of all colors. We found the fuscia ones were the tastiest. It's a good thing they turned out to be edible. It was probably Jenny's idea. She had lots of those. I can't say I've ever been particularly pliable in other people's hands, but I did think Jenny was intriguingly tragic. Later on I learned that tragic people do not make the best friends.

I thought I would share this little garden "plan" with you. I know how you've come to rely on my wholesome scientific approach to all aspects of my life and I don't want to let you down. These drawings have obviously been meticulously drawn to scale. I am a stickler for precision. My mom helped me plan this out according to the deceptively simple concept of companion planting. I really wanted one whole bed of basil. Remember? For all the pesto I want to make and to freeze. My mom insisted I mix it in with the tomatoes.

One major problem with companion planting is that some things just don't play nice, apparently. While you can plant anything with lettuce, apparently only spinach should be paired with eggplants. I'm cheating. I'm putting peppers and tomatilloes in the same bed because there's no where else to plant them. The idea is to not plant family members together or else you will be inviting pestilence to ravish them. Is this how come human families tend to fan out amongst the populace? To avoid pestilence? Is this why everyone jokes so much about the rather insular folks in the Appalachian mountains? (I have heard that some of my stock were from just such an uneducated poor Appalachian family of Irish descent. But stories in my family tend to change over the years so you can never really be sure of who you are. I guess it keeps things interesting)

I'm not speaking to myself today. I'm that mad. Do any of you remember me talking about trying to accomplish a few things from a list every single day to try to get a little healthier? On that list were things like: take your multi vitamin, get to sleep by 10 pm, drink eight glasses of water, stretch, exercise... remember how some of you wisely advised me to only try to tackle one or two things at a time? I really have stuck with that. I now have found a way to make sure I take my vitamins with my meds every day (I use a pill divider that has one compartment for every day of the week, so they are all ready for me to take when I get up in the morning. Very ingenious!), I have also been keeping up with lots of stretching.

Unfortunately what's killing me is not getting to bed by 10 pm. Having been a serious insomniac for the greater part of my life, I have some issues with sleep. First of all, I don't actually like doing it. I mean, now that I have a kid, I kind of treasure it for how it helps me to survive, but I don't like getting into bed. Having extremely disturbing nightmares frequently for the majority of my life has not helped my view of sleeping as being an over rated activity not unlike watching a long string of truly distressing horror films that feel like they're coming to life. Plus, you can't drink beer in your sleep.

I don't actually have insomnia now. Having a kid has mostly fixed that problem. (Except for the few weeks after that nasty little earthquake we had whose epicenter was almost right underneath our house. I'd still be in a nasty cycle of insomnia if I hadn't started taking Paxil at that time. Which my therapist had really wanted me to do a year before in order to help me with my cognitive behavioral work which I was finding challenging because my anxiety was sort of off the charts. Sometimes doctors do know best.)

Anyway, this resistance to getting to bed at a reasonable time is not helping me at all. Not in any way. I broke this cycle of resistance once before. Ironically, it was not too long before that earthquake I just mentioned. I had been losing weight by watching my portions, exercising, only drinking two beers a day (I realize that to some people this sounds excessive, but doctors generally agree that two a day, while not being ideal, isn't actually a problem), and getting into bed by 9pm to read for an hour before sleep. I actually got to looking forward to getting into bed with a book. It was hard establishing this routine, but once I did I definitely felt better.

Part of the trick was keeping our room relatively clean and we painted the walls, got some new nice bedding, and put some pretty pictures on the wall. Doing this made the room a pleasant place to be. I can't say I feel that way about our current room. But you know, our current room is tiny, has a very small window, and just isn't an inspiring place to be. I painted the walls, it's true. But the furniture isn't pretty like our old furniture was. I keep planning on finding a couple of posters of Nick and Nora to frame. Maybe a couple of pictures of me and Philip too, when we looked just as stylish as Nick and Nora.

My doctor has actually suggested I go back to therapy for several good reasons. I am no longer afraid to seek help like I was for so many years before. Yet I haven't made the call. Partly because that will be one more complication in my life. One more appointment to remember. Partly I'm afraid of the expense. My insurance will only cover so much of my visits. This could be a drain on our dwindling resources. This is also why I have failed to call a chiropractor. Or a masseuse, which I could really use to unknot my neck and shoulders. I normally hate people touching me and for that reason I have actually never had a massage by anyone but Philip. He gives pretty good massages but I've come to the point where I think I need to let someone really have a go at my stiff neck.

Anyway. I've been staying up super late. Falling asleep in my chair. Waking up in my chair at 2 or 3am. That's not beauty sleep. That's HAG sleep. And it needs to change. So I'm going to chew on possible ways to either convince myself to go to bed earlier or ways to deceive myself into complying. So this is my new goal in my on going personal make-over efforts: to get to bed by 10pm. Asleep by 11pm. Someone needs to take away my DVD privileges. Any one want to volunteer to come to my house at 10pm, turn my television off, and stand guard there until I am safely ensconced in bed with a book? Thanks! I'll show you my appreciation by swearing at you and kicking and screaming the whole way to bed. Because I'm so mature that way.