Ever since I stopped taking Lexapro, I’ve had chronic sleep maintenance insomnia. Nothing I’ve done over the years has helped alleviate the problem, from medications, to meditation, to CBT-I administered by a sleep psychologist. I have a veritable pharmacy of sleep meds in my closet from past attempts.
I took a week off of work for my birthday, and as can probably be expected, I spent much of that playing games.
Being in a cat-like mood, I started with Stray.
Meow
It’s a relatively short 7-10 hour game where you control a cat on a quest to rejoin its friends after being separated from them. Like any cat, you can’t talk and must interact with objects using only your mouth and claws. And of course there’s an achievement for meowing at least 100 times. Meow.
The man stared weary ‘cross the valley
o’er all that he had wrought,
what he had yet still to do,
and felt a yawning despair overtake him.
Forty-five years, eh? Malformed though I am, I somehow surpassed my expectations to reach this point, and it’s certainly been an interesting life thus far. College, marriage, a few books, and perhaps even the pinnacle of my career, and then what? Who can say.
Well, it finally happened. A caught Covid a couple weeks ago starting Monday July 25th. Despite being in Italy in early 2020, I somehow dodged the initial outbreak and then remained Covid free for the next two years. I was even beginning to believe I’d already caught it asymptomatically some time in the past and was actually immune now. Like that time I had a random two-week long dry cough in 2020. But no, and there’s no ambiguity this time around either since I have a very positive test to prove it.
Jen and I have been using a Dyson DC-15 Animal ever since we got an apartment together in 2007, and it has been showing its age for a while. The brush driver was extremely hard to turn by hand, it frequently left things behind, and one it has always emitted a high pitched tone that drove me to don firing-range hearing protection.