Sleeping less

In recent weeks I have often gotten more like six hours of sleep in a night rather than eight. I fall asleep easily, I just wake up earlier than necessary or intended, then become alert instead of falling back to sleep. Over the day I largely function fine, I don't feel dreadful, though toward the end of the evening I can be feeling rather sleepy again. The situation seemed worth noting so I shall keep a watch on it.

Upon waking I have also noticed myself sometimes remembering a stressful dream. For example, this morning's had me at my previous job, joining colleagues for lunch in a restaurant, but the meal was going on for far longer than I had expected; there was even some kind of dance lesson for which we had to take our shoes off and I discovered that I had absent-mindedly put on somebody's bright pink fluffy slippers that day instead of my normal office shoes. That particular dream admits of easier oneirocriticism than most.

As sometimes happens, I have awoken with a growing headache. I am starting the day with coffee and paracetamol. I hear that the advice is to medicate a headache before it gets worse.

I am not a plumber

The house we rent has three toilets. Two had their flush fail, we should have had the third fixed at the same time. Now the third tends to fail too and the present lockdown makes me disinclined to have our landlord seek a plumber for anything other than a true emergency.

On closer inspection that third toilet seemed simply not to be refilling quite enough any more. The float is on a kind of plastic screw so I raised it to a higher level and that does seem to have helped. However, there is some other issue where, even with plenty of water, sometimes the flush can't get started fully. On the intake pipe I have found what looks to be a valve that allows me to cut off water to only that cistern but I shan't try to replace the mechanism myself, the chance is too high that I will simply end up with a useless toilet.

Checking vitals

In my usual check for COVID-19 symptoms my temperature this morning was a normal-for-me 97.1°F and my pulseox check showed no lower than 98% saturation. The monitor still sometimes beeps though because my heart rate has steadily declined as my fitness increased and weight decreased: when I was unfit and obese, even at rest it was around 90bpm, now it's typically in the 60s. Even though I had a coffee this morning it got down to 45bpm during my measurement, when my saturation was at 99%, and the machine beeps below 50bpm. I am quite relaxed at the moment, resting on the sofa drinking tisanes before my morning workout. As previously noted, caffeine has no perceptible stimulant effect on me; that was the same for my father and his brother and also seems true for my son. During a typical workout my heart rate reaches 150bpm or so which is right around my target so at least it remains able to increase as necessary.

Surprisingly buoyant stocks

My stock portfolio looks far less rosy than it did earlier this year but, as I have no need to cash out in the near term, I take it as being part of the ride. As I noted here at the time, I had not expected the degree to which the markets would plummet: it was a surprise that all my buy orders triggered within a short period. Of course, the counterpart to such buy orders is some corresponding sell orders. Profit seemed a remote possibility so last week I was surprised to already have notification that my orders for selling stock in General Mills and Walmart executed. Upon looking more closely I found that an order to sell some of my Pfizer stock had come close to triggering also. I wonder what is with this early recovery, it seems to me that the US is still heading into the worst of this crisis and both governance and medicine have considerable work ahead of them yet.