Sleep Revelation

 All bow to the wisdom of Wife

For years I have had issues with sleep. I don't sleep much at one time. Maybe 5 hours. I compensate by take a couple of naps a day when I can get them. Particularly infuriating has been a pattern. 

On days when I have to get up early (for me around 4 AM), I will set my alarm. On those days, I seem to sleep particularly deeply. I will be in the deepest sleep when the alarm goes off. Then on the days when I can sleep late, I don't set the alarm. But instead of sleeping deeper or later, I tend to not sleep as well and am always up early anyway. 

Wife suggested that maybe there was something psychological going on. Her thought was when I set the alarm I can relax knowing I will be woken up and can therefore go into a deeper sleep. But when I don't set the alarm, I somehow am less relaxed and therefore don't get into such a deep sleep.

This weekend I had three days in a row where I didn't have to get up a a particular time. On Friday I set the alarm for a time much later than I would normally get up. Indeed I slept straight through until the time the alarm went off. On Saturday, I did not set the alarm and I had a very disrupted, not restful sleep. On Sunday, I again used the alarm set to a later time and had the same deep, later awakening sleep as on Friday.

Could this be a breakthrough in sleep? I hope so.

Return Of The Great Foodie Posts - Running Amok

 I am now up to 2016 in my review of my blog posts. It seems it has been ages since I wrote a real food preparation post. Like so many whose prior life patterns are disrupted I too have been doing quite a bit of cooking. On Friday I went to our local Asian Supermarket for the first time since the pandemic restrictions. I bought a bunch of special condiments AND I bought a couple of fresh fish. Wife and I have found the fish at this market are always better and less expensive than elsewhere in our landlocked city plus there is more variety. I bought a couple of Golden Pompano. I knew this was more than we needed but planned to use the surplus for another meal. My inspiration - Amok - the national curry of Cambodia.

Step One - Make Your Curry Paste

Curry pastes are foundational to the cuisines of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia (Vietnam has a different ethnic and food heritage). They are made by taking a combination of roots, stalks and leave and pounding them with spices until they become a paste. The recipe I used for Amok calls for garlic, shallot, galangal (similar to ginger), tumeric root, lemongrass, kefir lime leaf, salt, brown sugar, and hot chile paste.

Below from top to bottom - Kefir lime leaf, galangal, shallot, lemongrass, garlic & tumeric root

I buy these in quantity and freeze them so I can whip up variations when I need to.  When using I then grate them into my Mortar and Pestle. This makes it much, much easier to pound into a paste than when they are raw (because the fibers all breakdown when they are frozen)

After the requisite pounding

Next on to our fish stock

I took the leftover fish and separated the meat from the bones and skin. I took the latter and added onion, carrot, garlic and ginger, covered with water, brought to a low boil and cooked for 15 minutes.

Now on to making the Amok Curry

We take Crab or Shrimp Paste and cook quickly in oil

Then we add some of our fish stock and coconut milk 

Now we add a healthy dollop (that is a scientific Grandparent cooking term) of our Amok paste. NOTE - putting the cooking liquids in first and adding the paste is distinctly Cambodian. All other SE Asian cuisines fry the paste in oil. This Cambodian technique produces a decidedly lighter flavor.

After cooking our paste for just a few minutes, add your cooked other ingredients - in my case the cooked fish and some cooked squash

Heat through and serve on rice

Dinner is served 

(Note - the corn on the cob is NOT traditionally done in Cambodia lol)

Breezing Through The Summer

 Whether it is climate change or just normal long-term cycles, the last three summers have had unusual patterns with rain coming earlier and our looked for late summer monsoon raining and cooling down being preempted by hot dry weather. So again this summer we are in August heat. The last two years Wife and I suffered mightily. We use evaporative coolers instead of central air conditioning because they are way more energy efficient in our desert climate. But the one we'd had since we bought the house wasn't getting the job done at all which made the environment for living and sleeping miserable (as #3 can attest to from current circumstances in Amsterdam). I'm still not sure why that was. It's a pretty freaking simple device. Just some pads (think giant size sponges), a system for pumping water over them so they get soaked, and a fan for pulling air through the pads causing the water to evaporate and thus cool down. How such a think could stop working is beyond me. But after a number of repair calls over the two years we finally threw in the towel.

So last fall me made the decision to get rid of the old thing. We were thinking of switching to air conditioning on account of wanting cleaner air with my asthma and Wife's allergies. That was going to be a big bill because we have two separate systems. Our upstairs evaporative cooler is working fine. But we couldn't have half the house on refrigerated air and the other on a swamp cooler (local parlance for the evaporative cooler). In shopping around, we found there was a new, much higher efficiency swamp cooler now available Two out of three vendors recommended it even though it was a lower cost product. They claimed that not only would it produce good cooling but was in fact better for air quality as they claimed that central air keeps all your air locked up without replacement and that's bad evidently.

Whatever, we bought the new unit which is a Breezair. With the summer mostly over,  I will report the product is everything that the vendors promised. It provides great, consistent cooling with much lower fan speeds than the old style units. Most of the time we hardly even know it is on. But despite days in the high 90's, we are enjoying the best cooling since we've owned this house.

With our new solar system, even with the coolers going all day, we still produced surplus electricity (this being the time one would be expecting maximum electricity usage).

 

Don't Be In Despair

 I have been going through my entire blog. It started in 2007 and I am now in 2015. I came across this post from 2015 that gave me a lot of comfort given our current state.

http://de-intimidator.blogspot.com/2015/07/just-be-thankful-anything-works.html

An Ode To Gratitude

 I am continuing my reading of all my blog posts. I am a bit over halfway through. I started writing in 2007 and I am in the spring of 2015. 

I have been amazed at all the eating, cooking, air travel I did during my pre-transition life. Now I am fully immersed in the second of our great long trips when we went to Istanbul for the first time. I am mildly amazed. My God we have done a crapload of experiences Wife and I. While this Covid-19 thing has us down that we (like everyone) are stuck and we can't get out and do, I am recognizing more and more how much we have actually already done. We truly did not let the opportunity pass us by!

And now I am in the middle of this almost surreal and transformational Theodora Ghana Project. Oh truly Lord let me fall down and bow in humility and give thanks for this incredible ride in life.

Time For A New Transition

This weekend was a most interesting one. It actually started early in the week. I was talking to one of my close business colleagues and mentioned to him how frustrated I was feeling about life at the moment. As he is works in financial planning, he asked me 1) what was frustrating me and 2) what could I do to change it.

Good advice. The kind I give to my clients all the time LOL. So I did just that. And what came up was what I've said consistently over the last few months. I am missing the balance I had when I was doing all my travel. I have slipped back into the imbalance of working all the time where I was before my transition from full-time work. This was mostly just fate. The biggest being the effect of the pandemic on Theodora and all the extra work necessary that would not have taken place without the pandemic. So I now knew what the problem was.

On Friday, my friend and I spoke again. I relayed my thoughts. His next advice was, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" Don't you just hate it when your confidants give you your own advice?

What was I going to do about? Well fate in the form of newly minted Middle Eastern Princess, Pu' al-Isha aka Daughter #2 who from her quarantined apartment in Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq out of boredom, sent Wife and I a link on something called the Golden Visa.

The Golden Visa is a program that for a certain size of investment allows you to get permanent residency in another country. Pu had sent one on Greece. This came to us around Noon time on Saturday. Wife and I were doing our own thing during the afternoon. Sometime during that period, I actually looked at the link and realized that the site referred to many countries that had these programs. This really intrigued me. Wife came downstairs. I mentioned to her my discovery. She replied that she had already gone a step further and looked at the countries and identified three as being the most cost effective for us. There was this moment of silence as we realized we were both rushing down the same logic path.

Conversations over dinner confirmed, we were ready. We are not happy where we are. We are unhappy with the on-going divisiveness in the U.S. We both doubted we could travel as we have in the past because of our physical deterioration. But if we were in a place already where travel was much easier. And I realized that I am really ready to totally give up work. That the only thing that really motivates me now is coaching and mentoring the Theodora women.

By Sunday, we had had conversations with all our children who were in one way or another very supportive. We threw together initial financial analyses and built out a 'to do' spreadsheet of things we would need to research. At first blush the numbers looked totally doable. There are a ton of details to be considered. We won't really be able to do serious research until we can travel again and actually go and look at where we might consider being (somewhere in southern Greece). But there is this palpable excitement.

Wife and I have done this more than once in our life - just picked up and moved to somewhere totally different. We have been in New Mexico for 27 years. We are ready for a change. We want one more challenge and adventure in our life. It is going to take a lot of effort, research and planning. It may not come to pass. But I am reminded of when we first came to New Mexico. We had an instinctive feeling we wanted to be here. It took two years, research and unplanned for events but we made the move. I am feeling the same way about this.