Sorry for neglecting y’all for the past few days. Full plate of work here, plus the stupid insomnia came back, so I was operating on half-battery for a few days. Lovely sleep happened last night, but I don’t have much much time for a long blog post. I’m working a short research gig and packing for a long weekend out on the North Folk of Long Island. It’s a girls’ weekend of wine tasting and beach walking.
No newsletter tomorrow, but I’ll be on Instagram with pictures.
Things in my weekend bag: Black slides for evening, Comfy sneakers for touring vineyards, knit black pants, a cute dress, and an animal print top.
What happens if public schools can’t get its act together this year?
On this morning’s walk, I listened to a story about the kids who get stuck in quarantine dorms on college campuses.
I wish people took advantage of vintage furniture. I see the most awesome stuff at estate sales that sell for a hundred bucks at most. It’s so much more fun to have a house of unique stuff than a house of IKEA and Pottery Barn.
Martha Stewart is marketing CBD products? Hmmm. I’m curious if it would help Ian with his seizures. Anybody try it?
Apt. 11d 
I’m thinking of trying edibles, the kind with THC, but they aren’t legal here and the last time I had a flight that connected in Denver, they didn’t sell them at the airport. Somebody is leaving money on the table there.
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Yeah marijuana products that are legal here in CO are legal only in CO. (That’s what my package of edibles says). The good thing about being someone who never did much alcohol and drugs is that my tolerance is low. A 5 mg THC edible is plenty for me (sometimes I cut them in half) and when I buy them the guys at the counter call them micro doses.
I find that getting high a couple hours before when I want to sleep means that once I come down I get amazing sleep.
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I just think airports and flying would be better with a buzz, but drinking on planes hits me wrong before I get a buzz.
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Our public schools had delays too – my grade 4 is in his first class today (! It’s insanely quiet here but I haven’t been able to adjust yet) and my high schooler has a hybrid model and has a Google Meet today but his first in-person class is tomorrow, for one course. The second course starts the 22nd. I’m assuming the school year will be extended, but weather-wise that’s better for outdoor classes and ventilation anyway.
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re: insomnia
I heard this as a podcast, more than a decade ago. It was, hands down, the best lifestyle advice to deal with insomnia. Dr. Rachel Manber, from Stanford.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sleep-where-biology-and-psychology-meet-audio/id385767111?i=1000085472933
Basically, if you can’t sleep in the middle of the night, don’t stay in bed looking at the clock. That reinforces the insomnia patterns in the brain. I find it helpful to go unload the dishwasher, for example.
I’m always worried about bedbugs with upholstered furniture.
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My sister swears by CBD for anxiety and pain (which she has a lot of due to cancer treatments). I tried it for anxiety and the only thing that happened is my ears started ringing.
Have fun on the North Fork. I have fond memories of visiting my grandmother in Cutchogue (we always called it Mattituck) at the cottage she rented in the summers back when it was cheap. Those cottages go for over a million now.
Go to the Magic Fountain for ice cream. Yum.
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I have found that there is nothing that annoys insomniacs more than advice on how to overcome it, but my own rules are: (i) no screens (although cellphone doesn’t affect me) for half an hour before bed, (ii) no lying in bed awake for more than an hour: get up and go to another room and read, (iii) no doing anything in bed other than sleeping (yes, there’s one obvious exception, but no eating, watching TV etc.), (iv) no sleeping in, no matter how little you slept the night before, and (v) no sleeping anywhere but in bed: force yourself off the couch and into the bedroom.
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I thought Laura might find this short bit about a family moving to BC Canada for school interesting. https://www.kuow.org/stories/a-seattle-family-moves-to-canada-after-learning-that-school-is-all-day-online
I wish I had multiple passports
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My aim is to create a county where Bill Barr wants the extra passports.
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bj said,
“I wish I had multiple passports.”
We are (slowly) sorting out some boring international paperwork, but my three kids are all going to be eligible for US, Canadian AND EU citizenship.
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lucky ducks
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bj said, “lucky ducks.”
Of course at the moment, we’re not going anywhere…
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There’s some anecdotal evidence reported here in NZ for CBD in treatment of seizures.
[The whole cannabis issue is big here, because we’re about to have a referendum on it]
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/118900577/she-was-a-zombie–off-label-cbd-transforms-epileptic-twoyearold
I believe that there is research – which is a bit iffy on outcomes (i.e. works for some, doesn’t for others, and there’s no good explanation of why). Under medical supervision, the side effects certainly look manageable.
If your son’s seizures are increasing in frequency and severity – I agree that it’s worth exploring this with his specialist.
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“I wish people took advantage of vintage furniture. I see the most awesome stuff at estate sales that sell for a hundred bucks at most. It’s so much more fun to have a house of unique stuff than a house of IKEA and Pottery Barn.”
Brown furniture is dead, dead, dead. Part of it is Ikea, and part of it is smaller dwellings and not sitting at a desk to write, etc. And then, once everybody has the expectation that Aunt Twyla’s furniture is worthless, it becomes worthless.
By the way, stamp collections are circling the drain, too. Kids who would forty years ago have been very carefully licking the gum on stamp hinges to affix their prized Argentine 2-peso stamps into the album are now playing Grand Theft Auto and searching the Internet for T&A sites which somehow escape the parental control software. Lost world.
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I stopped buying antique/vintage/estate furniture due to worries about bedbugs. I still appreciate brown furniture, but would have to go through a dealer or business I could hold responsible for the extermination bills. I actually find estate furniture to have better dimensions for my mid-century house than Pottery Barn, etc.’s offerings, which seem designed for McMansions.
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I just looked at Hometown U.’s COVID dashboard, and Hometown U.’s active cases are down 85% from peak–there was a really bad first week of class but active cases have.been declining for nearly three weeks now.
The public schools that have class in person are a bit more complicated to get a handle on, but (after an ill-advised out-of-school social event in August that led to dozens of high schoolers being quarantined) the county public schools are definitely not blowing up.
The college started classes nearly a month ago with the county around 15% positivity and the county positivity is now around 7%. There may be some weirdness here due to the fact that the college is testing testing testing, but down is good! Campus positivity is just under 4% for clinical (people who it is suspected might be sick) versus just under 1% for the random surveillance testing.
I don’t love the county COVID situation, which is bumping along with more new cases than I’d like to see (most recently about 16 new cases per 100,000 per day), but the number of estimated active cases is lower than I’ve seen in months. We’re down to about one active case per 770 residents, versus about one case per 120 residents, which I believe was where the county peaked.
If I had my druthers, the K-12 schools would have some sort of fast testing regimen, but they do seem to be doing pretty well, even without that. So far, there don’t seem to be any mass infection events in the schools. Some families are choosing to do remote.
My school kids have been in class in person at their private school for over a month now, while my college freshman has been in class in person for nearly a month. In both cases, there were some bumps in the first week or so, but so far so good. A lot of the remote kids have come back to in-person school.
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Oh, crud.
“Thanks to the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed and other programs, a number of Covid-19 vaccines for adults are already in advanced clinical trials. But no trials have yet begun in the United States to determine whether these vaccines are safe and effective for children.”
““Right now I’m pretty worried that we won’t have a vaccine available for kids by the start of next school year,” said Dr. Evan Anderson, a pediatrician at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine.”
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