At sea ...

In all my aspirations to go off sailing, I never realized just how dark and empty the ocean can be at night. Lat night, standing on the bridge like Leonardo DiCaprio, I gazed into the dark, silent ocean - it was mostly cloudy and windy, and the wake of the ship is all you could see. I then decided it would be a little unnerving to do this on a little sailboat with only 1/2" of fiberglass between you and the deep.

We're "sailing" (I don't know why we use the term - there's no sailing involved), off the coast of Cuba, a respectful distance from their territorial waters, heading east. Once we round the island, we'll turn south towards our first port of call - Cartagena, Columbia.

I would have photos attached to these blog posts, but for now I'll just post text. Internet access from the ship is $0.75 a minute, so about all I can do is sync my email - nevermind uploading photos (will post here when I get home).  So far, I've run across no free access to WiFi in the USA, but at the hotel and two airports in Canada it was free for the taking. I wonder if that says something about the economies of the two countries - one finds itself relatively rich (so giving stuff that costs almost nothing for free makes sense), and the other is scrambling to make a buck any and everywhere it can.

Long day .... Vancouver to Miami

Yesterday, we spent the day traveling from Vancouver to Miami via Toronto. The flight from Toronto to Miami was about two hours late, so total transit time was (leaving the Sheraton in Richmond to arriving at the Miami Marriott, Vancouver time) 6am to 7:30pm - about 12.5 hours. I guess the delay in Toronto was business as usual (Air Canada -so unavoidable), but waiting for a bus to take us to the hotel from the Miami Airport was something I probably wouldn't do - the "old me" would have just taken a cab and be done with it. Free WiFi was available at both the Vancouver and Toronto Airports, but once we got to Miami the charges started. No free WiFi at the Miami Airport, and the Marriott hotel here wants $14.95 a day for access. Today, with the ubiquitousness of the Internet, that is gouging. I've searched around the hotel property for something free, but no luck.. That's my rant of the day - WiFi should be provided free everywhere. It costs almost nothing, and can provide a public good. Soon, we'l be enroute to the cruise ship - where I expect they'll gouge again for access (guess - I could guarantee!).

--
Doug's Blog

While they play chess...

I received my daily newsletter from Simon Black (Sovereign Man) today, and he talks about the recent decision of the Chinese to try and make the renminbi a new international currency. The current world currencies (or fiats, as they're sometimes called) are the US Dollar, the Euro, and the Japanese Yen. These are the only three currencies today that have a large enough circulation (and subsequent backing of government)  to be able to absorb massive investment or divestiture of those same currencies. Imagine a $100B investment in any other world economy, and you can see what a large percentage of the local economy it would be - the local currency couldn't absorb it. The Chinese, I think, are interested in creating a fourth - or, more significantly, becoming the de-facto standard for world currency (much like gold or the US Dollar have been in the past).  The rest of the world goes merrily along minding it's own business, while one nation sets in motion a plan that may take a decade or more to complete.


Therein lies the rub. The Chinese have a distinct advantage to all other Western-style economies. Ours are based on democracy and elections, and theirs are based on strategy and long-term thinking. We make decisions that will seem popular for the next election cycle, and they make decisions based on their country's position in a decade or more. They're busy playing chess, and we're busy playing checkers...http://www.sovereignman.com/expat/opening-a-renminbi-savings-account-in-the-us/

An Enigma Wrapped In A Riddle...

For several months, my walking would max out at 3km. No matter how often or how far I walked, my right leg basically fell apart at the 3km mark. Since Christmas, though, there's been a remarkable increase in "distance-before-useless". Last week, as I said here on the blog, I walked 4.75km with Bruce through Minnekhada Park. Today, I walked to Save-On Foods and back - a distance of 6km. No resting except for standing in line at the grocery store.

I still struggle with sleep. The remarkable thing is that I did the walk today after two consecutive nights of no sleep. The only thing that I really notice after a sleepless night is an increase in emotional lability. It mostly appears when I'm by myself or with Laura - not very often when around other people.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with myself about all this.

Shooting in Tucson.

Yesterday in Tucson, Arizona, in case you were living under a rock, there was a tragic shooting which left six people dead and fourteen others injured. Among the dead were a nine year old girl, a Federal judge, a congressional aide, a retired church worker, and two other retired ladies. Among the wounded was a forty year old Congresswoman, which elevated this shooting onto the front page of every American (and Canadian, and British, and ??) newspaper and news website. Otherwise, unfortunately, this event would be nothing but a news ticker on the bottom of the CNN telecast. It probably would have made a story, and you would hear about it on the news, but they never would have preempted "Your Money" for it.

That's only one of the issues that raise their ugly heads after a tragedy like this. Regardless of the motives (or lack thereof) of the gunman (and possible accomplices), it's our reaction to these events that are telling. You can expect a bunch of rhetoric about the "softening" of the political dialog in the US, the questioning of second amendment rights (why is it that anyone can go and legally buy a handgun with a thirty round clip?), the questioning of Arizona's gun law (where it's legal to carry a handgun without a concealed weapon permit), and many others. But, in the end, nothing will change. A lunatic white man shooting at a crowd of people is seen as less threatening than some foreign born brown person with a different religion than most. The second changes our behavior, the first causes us to talk a lot, but changes nothing.

You're never going to filter out the nutbars when you make it easy to own a weapon like the Glock 9mm that Jared Lee Loughner had. The only good thing that could come out of this mess is the one thing that never will:

• Make it very hard to follow through on your deranged thoughts. 

What if we made owning a gun as hard as lighting a fire without matches? What if you made it distasteful to run attack ads or incite hatred of your opponent? What if you could take away most of the potential "triggers" for a madman?


UPDATE: If you watched the Rachel Maddow Show tonight on MSNBC, she goes through a truncated list of all the firearm/handgun related mass-murders in the US over the last twenty years. You forget just how many of them there were...

One year..

Today marks the one year anniversary of my escape from "the big house". While the progress can seem minimal at times, when you look back over the course of one year, it's quite remarkable. Yesterday, my friend Bruce and I took a hike through Minnekhada Park. It's been over a year (duh!) since having done any walks through the wilderness, and I really thought that attempting a hike would be a springtime affair. Regardless, Bruce and I went out for a walk in the woods. I surprised myself - didn't have any major problems navigating roots, rocks and hills - and completed the 4.75km circuit without completely falling apart. I can now see that hiking is something I will be able to do (and can already, in a limited sort of way). Thanks to Bruce for taking the time to invite me, and to "spot" me on the (sometimes icy) tricky parts.

Over for another year...

We took down all the Christmas decorations this morning. We didn't really have all that much up this year, and after Laura got all the ornaments off the tree, the whole process took no more than a half hour.

Now on to the soon-forgotten New Years Resolutions:

(1) I'm going to up my walking by 200m per week (about 10km in a year). I can now walk, without much discomfort, 4.25km - so if I can add 10km to this that would be about as far as I used to walk. It also puts short hikes into the equation. If I walk every day - rain or shine - I think this is doable.

(2) The progress on sleep is very slow and (pun intended) tiring. I'm doing everything the books and programs say to do, but with very limited success. The problem today seems to be "fractured sleep". I fall asleep OK, but cannot remain asleep very long. Then I'm up and down for the remainder of the night (mostly up). I will continue on with this holistic program, and continue the Ativan taper (now on 0.5mg) and hope that when the drugs end, my sleep improves.

(3) The plan for what to do with the rest of my life has reared it's ugly head. Both Laura and I agree that I need a plan, and that sitting at home for decades more is out of the question. Although sitting at home with some kind of business would be, for me, ideal. I need to get the main health question (sleep) out of the way before I can seriously address this one.

(4) As time goes on, my speech continues to get better, in an almost unnoticeable way. Those that don't see me for a couple of months notice a difference in the speed and my ability to get more words out without taking a breath. Not quite "reading" pace yet, but close. The only therapy I'm using for my voice is to keep talking. I'm even adventurous enough to try and tell a joke or two (I tend to laugh at my own jokes - always did -- so this makes it even harder).

So I've basically got two resolutions that are new this year: first is walking, second is developing a plan. The other two areas (sleep and speech) have lives of their own, and they are ongoing from last year.

Onward and upward! Kathryn gave me a small plaque over a year ago while I was in the "Big House". It says "If it's in your way, climb over it".

Earth Abides

This is my first post deviating from the previous four years ... this will be entirely random, and my random thought today is that my daughter, Kathryn, just finished reading "Earth Abides", by George R. Stewart (no relation, I don't think?). This is a book I've had for a couple of years, and I've got an audio version of it (bought it first) and then a hard-copy, paperback version. I used to say that "East of Eden", by Steinbeck, was my favorite book. Now I'm not so sure. I've read and listened to "Earth Abides" three or four times now, and it never seems to get stale. Every time I listen/read this book I discover something new. It's a post-apocalyptic novel, but not in a zombie, burnt out future (Mad Max) kind of way.

A young grad student, Isherwood Williams, is up in the woods near San Francisco. He gets bitten by a rattlesnake, and cannot get off the mountain he's on and suffers through days of sickness. When he finally gets off the mountain, he discovers that he's all alone - everyone has died from some kind of pandemic while he's been in the back country. This is the story of his life after the event. Who he meets, how they form families and neighborhoods, how their offspring thrive (or not), and how he manages the slow disintegration of technology (while this novel was written in the 50's - it's amazing the amount of technology already around that people depend on - think power grid, flushing toilets, bullets, canned food). The book is epic in it's sweep of the new history, and chronicles Ish's entire life.

I don't know that I'm quite ready to replace "East of Eden" for this book, but I'm tempted.

Sleep - Part II

This has been extraordinarily frustrating. Just when I think I've got this issue resolved, I have another sleepless night. These aren't the odd night where you only manage 4-5 hours, but are the physically draining 0-2 hour marathon in bed. I'm trying to train myself to get up when I find myself awake for a half hour or more, but even that doesn't seem to help. As with the drug problem before, I can find no "common denominator" with what works and what doesn't. Seems that maybe if I'm not tired enough when I go to bed, I'm likely to have a sleepless night.

Regardless, this is now day 29 of this new "regimen" I'm on (SleepTracks, light in the morning, more activity during the day, getting up at the same time, going to bed later) and I would have hoped I'd retrained my brain by now ... apparently not. I'll keep on going for as long as it takes, since this appears to be the only successful way of tackling this problem. If I've suffered through this for the past year, what's a few more months?

Christmas 2010 Letter

The full Christmas 2010 Letter is available at Google Docs.

Merry Christmas!!
Doug

First Sleep

Today was the first morning in over a year where I felt well rested and not too drugged up. I finally gave in to the thought that my sleep would never improve with pharmaceuticals (Ativan) and, although I've tried to wean myself off it twice before (Ativan is a drug you have to very slowly (months) wean off of because of the physical dependency it builds and the severe side effects it can have). I will just have to admit that it will take some time - but my quality of sleep cannot suffer any longer. I started to do some research about sleep (I have no idea why it's taken me this long), and found out that there are millions of people out there just like me. The only cure is a purely holistic one, involving re-training your brain to associate day with wakefulness, and the bed with sleep. It's difficult to get the initial part (wakefulness) going in these northern climes, because there just isn't enough sunlight to trigger that effect in your brain (ie: sunlight = shut off melatonin production). I didn't know that your average living room would have maybe 75 or 100 lux of light hitting your eyes, while noon on a sunny day can be as much as 20,000 lux. No wonder the incidences of SAD in Canada are high (especially here in Vancouver, where you get months and months of grey). Regardless, I built myself a crude light box with 6 x 1300 lux flourescent bulbs, and am trying to eat breakfast with this horrendously bright light beside me. It should trigger my brain to recognize morning. In the night-time, I've learned about something called "prior wakefulness" - it's basically that "sleep pressure" builds up during the day, so that the longer you're awake, the more "pressure" there is to sleep. This means going to bed later - for me it's now between 12:00am and 12:30am. It's hard to get your mind around the fact that going to bed earlier has no direct correlation to how well or how much you sleep - only that you'll have more time staring at the ceiling.
This whole experiment in sleep has cost me about $200 (including the light box), so really, if it works, it will have the best ROI I could have imagined. The things that really helped me out were a program called SleepTracks and a book from the library called "Say Good Night to Insomnia" by Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs and Harvard University. They were both invaluable.

PS: I think I've got an explanation to why I got this "sudden bout" of insomnia: Three months in the hospital with little or no physical exercise, low - indoor light all the time, and wintertime in Vancouver.

Wine ... finally

I happened to notice this last Saturday night, while Laura and I were at the Chambers' for dinner. We brought a (new to me) South African wine called "The Wolftrap". It was a blend of 68% Syrah, 30% Mourvedre and 2% Viognie. This red wine was delightful to drink. Mostly because I've been unable to properly drink wine for over a year. Red wines burned my throat and caused me to cough - white wine was better, but still not back to what it was pre-stroke. I could drink this red more or less the way I used to. Bruce had another bottle of red at dinner, and this one was hard for me. Then, as an experiment to myself, I had some other Shiraz blend last night - it was fine too. This is terribly exciting for me as wine, chocolate, and cheese are what life's all about. I had two out of three before (no problem with chocolate or cheese), but now I'm three for three. Exciting (for me at least).

Financially OK it seems

I had a good visit with the bank Tuesday this week. For the last couple of months, Laura and I have been "concerned" about how quickly she'll need to go back to work, and when I'll be ready and able to do something productive (and maybe earn some money too). We have "enough" to last for a couple more years, and we'll probably be OK once my LIRA kicks in at age 55, but we'd like to travel while we're still able and travel insurance isn't a big obstacle.

Well, I kinda expected that we were OK, but my meeting with the bank confirmed it. Barring another economic meltdown, and the federal government becoming insolvent, we should be just fine for the rest of our days (their projections only go out to age 90 - so I think we're OK with that). Anything we can earn between now and then is a bonus. As long as we keep spending at a reasonable level, we won't run out.

It's amazing how the third-party analysis gives you some confidence in what you have and what you've done to get it.

Big day for me on the bike!

I made a couple of milestones today on my bike. First, I was able to get all the way up a steep, rocky (slippery) slope by standing on the pedals (I haven't been able to stand on the pedals and actually pedal before). Second, I was able to negotiate some pedestrian "gates" both going uphill and downhill without stopping or falling. These are things, of course, that your average ten year old does without thinking ... but for me, it's been a challenge.  Beautiful day, today and yesterday are exactly like a year ago - maybe a tiny bit cooler. What a difference a year makes!
PS: This ain't me in the photo.

One Year...

At about noon today, it all began ... my year of living differently. It seems to me that there are two things that the stroke has left me with, more or less permanently (although, who knows - I may see some change in the months to come) - my voice has changed (soft pallet still "frozen", so I sound like I've got a bad cold), and my ability to walk more than about 3km (can't really run at all). What I can do, however, is bike for a relatively long while (30km or so), and my attention span (ie: reading a book) is probably better than it was. Overall, the year has gone by quickly it seems. Much has happened - to me and to close friends and family. I can only hope and wish that 2011 turns out to be a good year, and that Laura and I get to enjoy some of the fruits that we worked for over the last thirty years