---

More sleep paralysis

Leading on from my paralysed gruntings (see previous entry), it appears that an awful lot of people wake up, totally paralysed!

 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Sleep Paralysis

Does anyone else wake up in the middle of the night and completely paralysed?

Take last night, for instance. Around 4am I woke up in a stupidly uncomfortable position and completely unable to move.

Brain-to-body: move, shake, wiggle - anything
Body: no, I'm sleeping
Brain: well, I'm not
Body: not my problem

Eventually feet respond and, it feels like I am thrashing them about wildly. My wife thought it was more like a dog scuffling on the door. Then the throat responds, in the style of one of those 'interesting' late-night foreign movies.

UNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!! URRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!


Heaven knows what my wife thought I was dreaming off.

By now, the feet have woken the legs, that waken everything else and I can flip over onto my other side and doze off again.

The conversation at breakfast.... interesting...

PS: can I just point out that the grunting was the only thing I could manage!

A cautionary tale about printers

6 months ago in a local PC shop I bought a snazzy Epson all-in-one printer/scanner/copier.  Lovely.  I asked the bloke in the shop for a spare set of cartridges and he duly obliged.  Interestingly, the spares appeared to have no connection with Epson at all.  "Made in the same place, but cheaper as you aren't paying for their labelling".  Unconvinced, I trot off home.  The third-party cartridges appear to work fine, once I cancel the 'This is not a genuine Epson product' warning.

4 months ago I bought some new cartridges, again.  These ones weren't even the same colour as the other third-party effort and claimed to be made by 'Pro Jet'.  Still, they worked fine.

3 weeks ago the black ink ran out.  Today, I got round to replacing the cartridge with a brand new Epson cartridge from Curry's (the other shop having closed for good, yesterday).  Alas, it appeared not to work.  Nor did the second black cartridge I bought to have as a spare.  An hour later after fiddling with nozzle cleaning, on-line help and such like I was no further on.  Time to phone customer support (dreading the question about where I bought by cartridges from).

After playing an easy game of Switchboard Roulette I get lucky early on and speak to a person who is (a) helpful, (b) a native speaker of English and (c) in the UK somewhere.  We go through the preliminaries - name, serial number and so on.

Then comes the question about the product numbers on the ink cartridges.  No problem with the black - the T0611 is one of theirs.  Next is cyan.  Of course, he does not recognise the Pro Jet code - I am forced to come clean.  For the sake of a few pounds, I have used third-party cheapo spares.  He informs me that unlike Epson cartridges, they do not contain anti-coagulants and unless changes as soon as they run out, often clog up the print head.  

Out of te goodness of their heart, Epson do not invalidate my warrantee but I am told to put in the proper cartridges and call back.

I tell my wife I am heading to Curry's for magenta/cyan/yellow ink.  I'll not mention the 'told you so' reply I got.

I put the new cartridges in the printer (£7 each, as opposed to Sainsburys' £15) and..... it all works.

PHEW!

My wife, the mouth

Mercifully, my wife does not look like this picture:



Although, as she hates dentists she was afraid she might (see my last post). So, after knowing her for five years and never knowing her to go to the dentist, I got her along to mine.

The results: one filling, that came out five years ago needs replaced (how on earth is the tooth not rotten?); a chipped/broken tooth needs fixed (after around four years of being ignored) and a wisdom tooth need taking out (we suspected that one). Oh, and a minor gum infection that needs a course of antibiotics.

Five years without a dentist and her only immediate complaint is that, for the first time ever (really!) she has to take a course of antibiotics. More on that in due course. I envy her health!

If you liked the pic, go here to see more of the same guy's work.  He has a nice modern version of the Burning Bush, here - though Moses looks a bit too much like Bill Gates!

An update

The weekend was also busy with the sad funeral of a family friend. He was a good guy but since his mid-40s has been generally ignoring/putting-off doctors' increasingly urgent warnings to stop smoking. Aged sixty, his heart called time. I endured freezing winds at the massive funeral and have resolved to purchase the vital ingredient of any male wardrobe - the Funeral Coat.



What else has happened? Poldark 5 has come into my posession, via a workmate. Absolutely brilliant books, set in 1790s Cornwall. The atmosphere and the times are so well captured - my wife doesn't like them though because they are a bit musty.

Ah, wifey.... she hasn't been to the dentist in several years and didn't like it when I told her (oh, around five years ago and several times since) that she should get a check to be on the safe side. No, she waited till she has no choice and I still had to make the phone call myself - if you see someone resembling the Elephant Man, that's her. Check back next Thursday, after she's been.


Update - I should point out my wife doesn't have dreadful dental hygiene.  She does appear to have a wisdom tooth coming through though.  She also had a very negative, and painful, experience with a dentist when she was in her teens - hence her reluctance to visit them.

Anyone remember That's Life?

That's Life (Esther Rantzen & co) was famous for, amoung other things, it's weird vegetables: turnips shaped like the Prime Minister; rudely shaped carrots and so on.

Readers of my blog in The Other Place may recall the prawn cracker that closely resembled my wife's lips.  Yesterday, she discovered a sweet potato that resembled a hedgehog.  It even stayed still long enough to be stroked.

 

(Off to be stupid somewhere else now)

Anyone remember This Life?

A few nights ago we watched the reuninion of This Life.  As you may remember, it was originally shown in the mid-late 1990s.  I easily identified with the characters - a bunch of happy, good looking people in their early 20s, all destined for massive success.

'This Life + 10' was the ten-years-on reunion and.... with the exception of Egg, they are all looking wrinkly, grey, thinning on top with the backside falling out of their lives.

One line from Egg sums it up: "I'm too old to play for England, even if I started now."

Off to be depressed somewhere else....