Yesterday I woke at 0200. Unable to return to sleep, I started drafting a TAQ submission. By 0630, I was feeling fatigued. I had a number of tasks to complete before a threatened heavy rainstorm / ice-storm came through. One task was the purchase of a replacement printer cartridge. The copy shop did not open until 0900, so I attempted to nap from 0700 to 0800. Closed my eyes, but was unable to sleep. I was worried about the storm, and what needed to be accomplished before foot travel became difficult, or impossible.
By 0830, I was on my way out of the house. According to the forecast, there was a brief window of no rain during which I could scoot up to the store and back. Being totally gonzo, I decided to take the woods route. I had not been that way for several days. The forest trails were hard packed and made for easy going. I did one rep of the hill climb then hastened off to the store.
The trail from the underpass to the St Raymond intersection was hard going. I was the first one through after the prior night’s snow fall. This is the difficult stretch mentioned in paragraph 8 of this post. El Gonzo really felt the burn during this trail-breaking effort. The rest of the walk was not much better. There were two inches of snow that had not yet been cleared. Beneath that snow was sheet ice. I made my purchases and carefully set out for the walk home.
As soon as I left the copy shop, a light rain began falling. The rain was not forecast to arrive until noon. The roadway became friction free, the sidewalk not much better. When the mechanical devices cleared the sidewalk, they left a polished surface that became wet and very slippery. Mr Gonzo walked in the road. That was the safer route.
Once home, I cleared the snow from the lower balcony. By the end of this job, I was too exhausted to tackle the upstairs balcony. Now totally Gonzo, I was too exhausted to make any lunch. It was around noon with no sign of the scheduled heavy rain and ice storm. I attempted to respond to Colin’s email but was too fatigued to make any sense. I had to lie down and nap.
When I woke, it looked like dawn was breaking. I was ebullient. The dawn suggested I had slept through the night without waking. I was therefore on my way to resuming a normal sleep schedule. When I came downstairs, I discovered it was actually 1800 of the same day. What I had seen through the window was dusk, not dawn. And the upstairs balcony still needed to be tackled. After completing that task, I had a dinner of soup and a salad. It was now 2100 and my body was again ready for sleep. Despite having other tasks that needed to be done, I headed back to bed in the hope that this time I truly would sleep thorough the night.
Unfortunately, someone was having a noisy party and their music woke me around 2300. I stayed in bed until midnight, then decided it was hopeless, and started performing housekeeping chores. Came downstairs and found the prior incomplete blog post which was missing two key elements. The first missing element was a graphic showing monthly walk mileage for 2015. Second, the entire intent of the prior post had been to describe the fact of my waking at 1800 believing it was 0600 of the next day. The sleep solution was the belief I had slept through the night uninterrupted and had therefore solved a problem. The sleep problem was the discovery that it was actually the later afternoon of the same day. The subject of the post had been completely omitted. Gonzo strikes again! It is now 0327 on January 10th. I am wide awake, the rain/ice storm is not scheduled to arrive until noon and there is lots to do including finishing a letter to Colin, and working on a complex post that describes a possible cause of Post Concussion Syndrome, or PCS. This is the problem I appear to now have and medical science lacks definitive understanding of the issue. I may have found the answer.
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Walk Data Summary for 2015
Nearly forgot to place the missing graphic:
Average miles per month: 106.21
Median miles per month: 134.34
Minimum miles per month: 2.44
Maximum miles per month: 172.80
Total mileage for 2014: 542.42
Average mileage for a 5 month period in 2014: 108
Average mileage for the same period in 2015: 125
Link to post with 2014 walk data.