09-01-2025 — Sleep, blissful Sleep
Howdy all. Weather same.
Laser, little changed. I did open up and ensure the water chiller was filling the laser tube area and not leaving air bubbles. That could cause overheating. I also ensured the air assist flow was blowing out of the “nozzle?” area towards where the burning spot on the material. And I found the focus gauge they included. Then, I turned the machine on and was going to set the power limit. I guess it caused something to trip the blasted AFCI breaker for that room. And the breaker box is in the garage. Well that ended it for the pre-breakfast morning session. I turned stuff off and came downstairs and reset the breaker.
Oh, here is what the actual laser looks like.
Inside the outer tube, you can see an inner tube. That is where the water runs through, and around the laser to keep it cooled.
I’ll hopefully get back to working on the machine later today.
On the topic of today, I have mentioned in the past that my sleep pattern has sucked forever. Likely due to the ADHD effects. When I was working, only getting (needing) a couple hours of sleep each night, was great for work productivity. And, I would spend most of the nights I didn’t have to work, catching up on the mundane household activities. Paying bills, catching up on personal stuff, laundry, watching TV, etc.
I had considered taking the ADHD meds just to get “normal” sleep. Some nights I wouldn’t sleep at all. I’d say out of a 30 day month, there were maybe 5 days with zero hours of sleep, 10 with 1-3 hours, and 12 with 3-4 hours of sleep, and the last 3 days were the ones where I’d get 5-6 hours of sleep and they were the worst. With that much sleep, I’d get up to go to work and be groggy for half the day. The mind was just not sharp. 3-4 hours was my perfect amount to be on top of my game.
Going back to when I was a kid, I spent most of the nights just making up stories (sci-fi usually) or doing mental computations, or worse, rehashing prior social interactions, and fearing upcoming ones. Who am I kidding? I still do that….
When I tell people that I didn’t sleep at all for the last couple of nights, or that it was only 1 or 2 hours each, they usually don’t believe it. They have been told their entire lives that not sleeping will cause major complications to the brain. Without getting too much into the science, there are people with what is called “Short Sleeper Syndrome” that do fine with less than 5-6 hours of sleep each night. Add that to the cyclical nature of ADHD and sleep, where lack of sleep enhances ADHD attributes, and that in turn inhibits sleeping (try falling asleep when your brain just won’t stop running full stop of a dozen ideas at once), and you get me.
Still people don’t believe it because they “Know” based upon their own single life, that a person must have at least 6? 7? 8? 9? hours of sleep to survive.
Well, nowadays, we have smart watches and phones that can monitor your sleep. Here are some pictures from mine for a night.
Starting with proof that I am alive! The numbers here show I’m doing pretty good for a 70+ year old, morbidly obese, male. Actually a physically fit 50 year old wouldn’t be unhappy with them.
My blood O2 does NOT drop significantly overnight. It stays in the 93-98 range most of the time. Sometimes it will get the 99-100, and if I’m out in the smog, drop to 91-92 because I can’t breathe out there — T.B. messed up my lungs a long time ago. At my age, 93-95 is still considered quite good.
My breaths per minute stick well in the 15-30 range. This is also great at my age. It doesn’t drop overnight — that would be seen, as well as lower blood O2, if I had Sleep Apnea. I joke that I can’t have that, because, to be woke up many times each night, you have to be asleep first, and that doesn’t happen.
To Apple, “Time Asleep” means overall in bed. The parts that matter are “Deep Sleep” and “REM”. You can see I had a couple “full” cycles of deep and REM before midnight. Split, with being awake in between, of course. Those added up to almost 45 minutes. Then just a couple more quick hits of REM later in the wee hours. Maybe another 45 minutes total. “Real Sleep” therefore was about 1 and a half hours spread over 8 hours. Notice the red on top. That is when I was AWAKE and the watch knew it for sure. Mostly because I was flopping around.
Standing hours. No guarantee I was actually on my feet every hour of the night and morning, but, the watch took my activity flopping about in bed to be the same as standing. I think the 1 pm grey bar was when I was sitting at this desk typing or watching YouTube without getting up. And the dark spot from like 5-7 pm was when I put the watch on the charger and forgot about it.
So, technology can “prove” I didn’t sleep for any single hour stretch that night. And, that I am still alive. If someone had asked me how I slept that night, and I had not seen the monitors, I would have guessed I slept for less than 2 hours total and that was split over 3-4 quick naps. And it was not a good sleep at that.
Do I wish I was “normal” (Human) and slept 7-8 hours a night, and could fall asleep with 10 minutes of my head hitting the pillow? You betcha. Apparently, there is like 1% of the population that are similar in their perfect sleep requirements being around the 4 hours a night. People like Jim Cramer (CNBC host), Barrack Obama (ex-president), and a bunch of CEOs from large corporations, not to mention some greats like Edison, Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin. I am in great company, and most of them were able to Enjoy Life