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Nov. 14th, 2016 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stitchwhichOh dear. I have lazily avoided blogging since last month. Nah, really - it wasn't laziness, it was a combination of anxiety and lethargy. I still feel it but tonight I also feel like writing in here a bit. Blink your eyes, none of this will be pithy, important, or memorable.
We had a local SCA event on Saturday. I was running the registration table ("Tollner" was my job) with two new volunteers to help me. A couple of weeks ago we had gotten into a discussion about how the job used to be called "Troll", as in the story about paying the troll in order to cross the bridge... but between trying to make our SCA jargon more academically respectable and also make it easier for new attendees to find the registration table, the title 'troll' had been made Officially Discontinued and Undesireable. A few people started calling the job "the Gate", which led to jokes about the movie Ghostbusters (Gatekeeper) so they just referred to themselves as "the Gate" which wounded my ears and bent my mind. So I went looking through sources and finally asked on a Medieval Academic list about alternate terms and lo and behold here was this perfectly useable one from Middle English that even sounded vaguely like our beloved-but-passé "Troll" - Toll(ner).
My two new assistants, though, liked "Troll" and wanted to be called that. I didn't think a whole lot about the silly excuses we invented during the conversation for justifying the use of it until the morning of the event when one of them showed up with three sets of wigs for troll-doll costumes. Human sized, of course. And so there we sat, the three of us, in pink (with a baronial coronet on), purple, and rainbow hair. As I was wearing Viking Norse clothing I was proclaimed 'the most historically accurate' troll. But only because none of us was going to strip down to our skin and stick our hands out to our sides while wearing silly smiles. Many, many photos were taken and posted on various media, which I shall be years living down.
Sunday morning they, and a few more of us, gathered together to watch a showing of Dr. Strange. I liked it. I know that some of my friends did not for feminist reasons but I hold in mind that Marvel and DC comics started being written for the most part for young, young men (okay, boys) in the early 1940-60s and frankly their access to women, or even girls, was in limited and strictly defined venues. So of course we're not going to see any real kick-hinney fabulous women characters. Well, except for Agent Carter, that is. DC/Marvel heroes are going to love without knowing that they do, estimable women who they can never actually have a relationship with. At least until the movies morph away from the script lines of the comic books which birthed them.
Sunday night featured a trip to the local Sentara Hospital System Sleep Clinic where I was wired up for every possible nocturnal behavior excluding sex and left to sleep in a dark room with very loud 'white noise' machine. It was a fairly comfortable room and the bed was a sleep-number type which helped this waterbed-loving person rest but the tech's insistence about sleeping on my back was annoying and then went beyond that into quite irritating. "I've had three vertebrae replaced and cannot lay on my back without extreme pain" didn't seem to have any relevance to her.
"I'll need you to sleep for at least half an hour on your back."
"I cannot lay, much less sleep, on my back."
"I'll need you to try - it is when you are on your back that we can most easily detect a need for a c-pap machine."
"I will be in an escalating amount of pain for each minute I spend on my back. There will be no sleeping. I hope you can understand that - I cannot lay on my back."
"Well try anyway. It is important for our test."
"If I were the sort of person who showed signs of apnea while somehow miraculously sleeping on my back during this evening's test, that would do no medical good towards helping me solve my sleeping issues because I DO NOT AND NEVER HAVE SLEPT ON MY BACK. Solving for a null situation is useless."
"It will only be for half an hour or so."
Sigh.
"Whatever."
I did sleep during the night, off and on (NOT on my back and only after taking oxycodone to deal with the pain I developed after trying to follow her instructions) and then came home, showered, slept for 10 whole hours, and showered again. I believe I still have smears of that blasted guck in my hair from the various sensors. No amount of hot water seems to fully eradicate it. I'm considering a dip in a vat of denatured alcohol. And I've been assured that they will be calling me in a few days to schedule more tests before I see the specialist next month.
Sheesh. All this because I'd like to see if there is a way to train me into a regular 6-8 hours of sleep at the same general timeframe each day since I have not been successful attempting it on my own.
We had a local SCA event on Saturday. I was running the registration table ("Tollner" was my job) with two new volunteers to help me. A couple of weeks ago we had gotten into a discussion about how the job used to be called "Troll", as in the story about paying the troll in order to cross the bridge... but between trying to make our SCA jargon more academically respectable and also make it easier for new attendees to find the registration table, the title 'troll' had been made Officially Discontinued and Undesireable. A few people started calling the job "the Gate", which led to jokes about the movie Ghostbusters (Gatekeeper) so they just referred to themselves as "the Gate" which wounded my ears and bent my mind. So I went looking through sources and finally asked on a Medieval Academic list about alternate terms and lo and behold here was this perfectly useable one from Middle English that even sounded vaguely like our beloved-but-passé "Troll" - Toll(ner).
My two new assistants, though, liked "Troll" and wanted to be called that. I didn't think a whole lot about the silly excuses we invented during the conversation for justifying the use of it until the morning of the event when one of them showed up with three sets of wigs for troll-doll costumes. Human sized, of course. And so there we sat, the three of us, in pink (with a baronial coronet on), purple, and rainbow hair. As I was wearing Viking Norse clothing I was proclaimed 'the most historically accurate' troll. But only because none of us was going to strip down to our skin and stick our hands out to our sides while wearing silly smiles. Many, many photos were taken and posted on various media, which I shall be years living down.
Sunday morning they, and a few more of us, gathered together to watch a showing of Dr. Strange. I liked it. I know that some of my friends did not for feminist reasons but I hold in mind that Marvel and DC comics started being written for the most part for young, young men (okay, boys) in the early 1940-60s and frankly their access to women, or even girls, was in limited and strictly defined venues. So of course we're not going to see any real kick-hinney fabulous women characters. Well, except for Agent Carter, that is. DC/Marvel heroes are going to love without knowing that they do, estimable women who they can never actually have a relationship with. At least until the movies morph away from the script lines of the comic books which birthed them.
Sunday night featured a trip to the local Sentara Hospital System Sleep Clinic where I was wired up for every possible nocturnal behavior excluding sex and left to sleep in a dark room with very loud 'white noise' machine. It was a fairly comfortable room and the bed was a sleep-number type which helped this waterbed-loving person rest but the tech's insistence about sleeping on my back was annoying and then went beyond that into quite irritating. "I've had three vertebrae replaced and cannot lay on my back without extreme pain" didn't seem to have any relevance to her.
"I'll need you to sleep for at least half an hour on your back."
"I cannot lay, much less sleep, on my back."
"I'll need you to try - it is when you are on your back that we can most easily detect a need for a c-pap machine."
"I will be in an escalating amount of pain for each minute I spend on my back. There will be no sleeping. I hope you can understand that - I cannot lay on my back."
"Well try anyway. It is important for our test."
"If I were the sort of person who showed signs of apnea while somehow miraculously sleeping on my back during this evening's test, that would do no medical good towards helping me solve my sleeping issues because I DO NOT AND NEVER HAVE SLEPT ON MY BACK. Solving for a null situation is useless."
"It will only be for half an hour or so."
Sigh.
"Whatever."
I did sleep during the night, off and on (NOT on my back and only after taking oxycodone to deal with the pain I developed after trying to follow her instructions) and then came home, showered, slept for 10 whole hours, and showered again. I believe I still have smears of that blasted guck in my hair from the various sensors. No amount of hot water seems to fully eradicate it. I'm considering a dip in a vat of denatured alcohol. And I've been assured that they will be calling me in a few days to schedule more tests before I see the specialist next month.
Sheesh. All this because I'd like to see if there is a way to train me into a regular 6-8 hours of sleep at the same general timeframe each day since I have not been successful attempting it on my own.
