My sleep meds are messing with me

But at least I don’t feel like the second time I got hit with a truck when I get up.

My bedtime sleep meds are a cocktail of gabapentin for nerve pain, melatonin to shut down the monkey brain, and ibuprofen for all the abused joints and muscles from having survived almost 20 years after getting killed with a truck. And there is a more poetic but less accurate way of putting that, evoking the Bard’s slings and arrows and other things. But back to the meds and the disruption to my sleep schedule. The problem is I sleep for 10 to 12 hours but then stay awake the normal 16 to 18 hours and I get further and further out of sync with sunrise and sunset. Basically I get enough sleep to run a 30 hour day. Unfortunately I live on a 24 hour planet. Now if I was living on a space station away from a planet this would not be a problem, but my application to live on an Orion Habitat has so far not been approved.

I have been watching videos on how to make more low RPM power for less money by retaining the stock cam and adding boost. Basically instead of swapping out heads, cam, and intake, keep everything stock and throw a couple of $300 turbos on it and use their small size and low inertia to put boost at low RPM and also not restrict flow at higher RPM. Until I actually get an engine (and the budget to build it) this is all masturbatory because I can’t actually do anything with it. I don’t actually have the engine to work on, I don’t have the budget to work with, I don’t have any parts to work with. Still hoping for the Power Nation 311 in³ 0.060 over bore Ford 302, so I get as many entries as I can get for the contest. As I posted earlier one of my options would be to sell or trade the prize engine to get a junkyard engine and transmission. Because I can get a nice junkyard engine and (probably) transmission for less than the value of the prize engine.

Anywho, this has gone on long enough. And I still hadn’t figured out what to do about the engine.

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I’m hot and a little short-tempered

And my meds are basically knocking me out most of the day. Seriously I didn’t get out of the bed until almost 1700 yesterday and I slipped between the sheets at 0500 or thereabouts. And I dropped off almost immediately, no time delay between kissing my wife goodnight and brain shutting down.

I wasn’t asleep the whole 11+ hours, because I did hear my phone telling me that the second Cup race at Pocono was starting about 1415 and promptly fell back asleep. I heard the sound my phone makes when I get a text, the sound when I get an Amber Alert, the sound when someone sends me a Facebook message. And I didn’t wake up enough to get out of bed until I had to take a leak at 1645, and even then it took a while to get everything functioning. You don’t know what frustrating means until you stand at the toilet trying to pee and nothing comes out, because your muscles are still not responding to your orders, especially including your urinary sphincter.

And for some reason the usual summer daytime setting on the thermostat feels like the Warm setting on the new oven. BTW that Warm setting is freaking wonderful for having late brunch for us late risers. Anywho I’m not sweating, but I’m definitely not comfy at 78°F anymore, and I’m not sure of why. I just don’t feel comfortable at what used to be a very comfortable setting. Might be related to my meds knocking me out for 11 hours today, might not be. But it is another thing making me unhappy today. I think it has something to do with other things that are making me unhappy that I don’t want to talk about here.

Anywho, I am still getting as many entries as I can for that 0.060 over Ford 302 (real size 311 in³ making that 5.0 a 5.09) from Power Nation and you haven’t been helping as much as you can. You don’t have to do anything besides click the link and enter the contest and agree to give me the engine if you win. Right now I’m 10 friends shy of the maximum of 10 friend entries. I guess I need to do something about that, somehow. Winning this engine would be a major boost to the Sprint-T project. I could sell it and buy a junkyard engine and transmission and all the controllers. Seriously, a 6.2L truck engine makes about the same power as the giveaway engine at high RPM, and a bunch more down low, as it comes from the junkyard with the long-tube headers I already have to fit the engine in the car, and it weighs about 80 pounds less. The difference is a junkyard engine will look like… something pulled from a junkyard, and the giveaway engine looks like… bling. And there is always the pull of bling. Who doesn’t like bling? I admit, I like bling, too, but what I like more is an engine and transmission that both work, and are as light as possible while also having good power and reliability.

Previous paragraph I tried to use some html to make the word bling look like sparkle or rainbow text, and all I got by copying in the code and swapping their “rainbow” and “sparkle” text for my “bling” text was this

bling

. It didn’t matter which code I used they both returned the same result, that you see here. I don’t have to describe it it’s right here. And that doesn’t look like either rainbow or sparkle no matter how you squint at it. And that is a good reason to put this to bed and not get any more angry at it for not doing what I coded it to do.

Trying to think straight through the fog

My new meds are starting to kick in, I didn’t have any neuropathy kicks or twitches last night and my tinnitus is getting quieter. But my sleeping is seriously borked because of the meds. I overslept and missed taking my laptop to get the bloatware removed because this med just knocks me out. Normally when I’m not getting sleep I’m not thinking too good, but for some reason when I get my coffee on this med I’m rarin’ to go, even though I’m still walking like an extra in a zombie movie. It’s the craziest thing, I’m thinking clear as a bell, but my legs and feet and fingers are acting like they never got out of the bed. I have been spending almost as much time fixing typos as writing because the fingers are only about 90% accurate in hitting the keys. And if you’re thinking “well that’s not too bad” just remember it takes a minimum of 3 keystrokes to fix a typo I catch immediately, and I’m averaging one mistake in 10 keystrokes. So, average of every 7 letters I have to fix something.

On a similar but not entirely related note, I love the verb “bork” when used in it’s non-sexual meaning of seriously SNAFUed. This is one of the few contributions to the English language from a SCOTUS confirmation that has survived longer than a couple of years.

On a brighter note, the cooling fans are going to fit the fan shroud nicely. One will fit in the upper right side next to the inlet for maximum heat transfer from the water coming from the engine, and the other will fit on the lower left to get as much as physics will allow from the second pass across the radiator. The idea here is to keep the coolant going into the engine as cool as possible to keep the combustion chambers cool for either best power or best fuel economy depending on which mode the engine is in. Don’t you just love thermodynamics working for you for once? And in case you don’t understand how this works, the formula for heat transfer from a radiator has the fluid temperature in the top half of the equation, meaning the hotter it is the more heat it transfers to the airflow. Which means most of the heat comes from the first pass across the double pass radiator, and by careful fan placement I can maximize that transfer for the lowest possible outlet temperature.

Going off on a tangent, current writing jam is “Dear Mr. Fantasy” by Traffic. There is an interesting dynamic that is peculiar to depressed people in the lyrics, how we use comedy to hide our depression. “You are the one that can make us all laugh, but doing it you break down in tears.” This was me for decades, “Laugh, clown, laugh!” while hiding my depression with comedy. “I love how your poetry makes me laugh,” for years.

Anywho, while I’m waiting on the parts to arrive I’m figuring out how they will be installed in the car, because what else can I do except write about it?

So, how was your day?

Nothing to report

I basically have just been hanging out and thinking and not really doing much because I lack the resources to do anything with. I have made some detail changes to the center section of the combined Sprint-T/TGS2 build that unless you somehow managed to get copies of the previous designs for comparison you wouldn’t notice the changes. Still trying to get the taking the meds schedule to mesh with the “normal” sleep schedule and having zero luck doing it.

Y’all have a good one.

Still struggling with getting the meds and my sleep cycle right

OK as I begin this entry it is 0451 and I have been up since 2130 yesterday. My sleep cycle has gone totally bonkers and the cats and I are trying to get it settled out. The problem is I need to take my antidepressant about 2200 or so so I can get to sleep at a reasonable hour. I missed taking it Tuesday and didn’t get sleepy until 1300 or so Wednesday, took the pill and went to bed and woke up 2130 or so. I’m hoping I can stay awake until at least 2200 and get myself back on a normal sleep schedule.

And I have this sense of deja vu like I have posted the previous paragraph before, probably because I did less than a month ago. I wish I knew why I’m having so much trouble keeping aligned with the rotation of the sun and how everybody else fits their lives to that rotation. I think it might be related to my depression, because I started having problems with my sleep about the same time my depression started.

Another problem I’m having is cats sleeping on my lap keep me from getting close enough to my computer to type with it on the desk and keep me from moving my laptop to my lap to type with it from there. I don’t see this as a real problem-problem and more of an annoyance. And the lap cats have suddenly decided the warm carpeted floor that doesn’t move around while they sleep is preferable to my lap. Since I can’t think of an Olympic god in charge of cats I will send gratitude to Freya who uses them to draw her chariot and somehow manages to get where she wants to go instead of where her cats want to go.

Now, on the hot rod front no progress has been made since Monday. The body still sits in a cage with bolt-on ends that are changed depending on the drivetrain. I can’t improve on that so I’ll quit trying. I’m sure there is some genius who could make it better without knowing which drivetrain they were designing for, the Sheldon Cooper of hot rodding, but I’m not at that level of genius. At this point the things I don’t know are more than the things I do know about this car because of not knowing the drivetrain. The drivetrain will change the front suspension, the rear suspension (especially if the RWD donor vehicle has independent rear suspension), the fuel tank size and location, battery location, and everything else, except the front and rear roll hoops. And the only reason those don’t change is because “I said so.” Literally those don’t move because I’m designing the car and I decided that they don’t get changed.

And just now I discovered that my semi-new phone doesn’t work. The entire audio side of the phone has gone dead, nobody can hear me if I talk, and I can’t use any function of the phone that requires audio output, so no alarms, no music, and no ringtones to let me know someone is calling. My phone has been rendered mute. Which makes me wonder what you call a phone that has no telephonic capability but still has other uses that work? I can still send and receive texts, Tweets, Facebook messages, and pictures. I think I’ll just quit now and stew a while so I don’t post anything I might regret later.

Still not dead yet

My hand is still messed up so this is gonna be another short post. Basically I had another trip to the Lab Rat Keeper yesterday and I’m still kicking with my BP under control, unlike after the washout phase from the last study where I was up to scary levels on my systolic. I dropped by the local owner-operated comic shop for my pull (Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) and also picked up a burger along the way. Not much else to say really except I got a letter from the people running the SPRINT study saying that I was still part of the study and they wanted to study my brain for signs of Alzheimer’s, to see if maintaining a low systolic pressure helps prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s.

Nothing much more to say so this is it.

Sorry I haven’t written…

OK catching back up, I’m on antidepressants long enough to have them adjusted twice now, and I’m “officially” not depressed, and the side effects are easing off. This particular med has some side effects that are distinctly unpleasant if you have had a UTI and that’s all I’m going to say about it.

I took several days off right when Mrs. the Poet got back from NY to go to my 40th HS reunion. I found out my face hasn’t changed much since I graduated based on the number of people who recognized me at the pub during the pre-reunion meet and greet. I also found that there were a number of girls wanting to go out with me if I had just asked, but since I didn’t…

I’m finally getting enough parts to start building the Mini Sprint-T. The order for the wheels, hubs, brakes and rear axles goes out tomorrow. I’m building two versions, so I’m getting the running gear for both in the same order. The main difference is one car I will have to narrow the wheels for, the other I will have to widen them. One will have 10″ street tires on 8″ rims, the other will have 14″ race slicks on 14″ rims. One car will have the LS7 and the other will have the SBC backed by a 700r4 automatic transmission. Both will have EFI, it’s just that the one on the SBC looks like a 4bbl carburetor with an extra fuel line and electrical cables.

I have found the steering box I’m going to use Classic Performance Products VEGA-PSB Power Steering Box. This box has almost the same ratio as the $600 Sweet 800 box for a lot less money and is a lot easier to integrate into the front end. The Vega box is much smaller than the 800 box and fits the same mount as the Vega manual box. I went to the manufacturer’s web site and downloaded the dimensions so I will be able to accurately model it.

And that’s pretty much everything I didn’t mention last time I posted. Opus