draggy days and troubled sleeps

Hello everyone. It's apparently another fine day out there. I have at last gotten a fairly good night's sleep. Some damned birds have been waking me up at around four each morning for days now. Thanks to a free bit of software I found called Serene sound, I was able to use my netbook and speakers as a noise generating machine. Combining "pink" and "white" noise, I was able to completely block out the damned birds and wake up as naturally as one can after days of broken sleep. It was still somewhat earlier than I would have liked but I'll take it gladly after what I've been through. I feel like I could try going out and walking part of the new route today and not be effectively courting death due to tired distraction. The serene Sound software is completely free and quite accessible with Jaws. You use the up and down arrows to set the volume of the sound or sounds you want to have playing continuously. It doesn't get more intuitive than that. Check out the homepage at:
www.serenesound.com

Last weekend was pretty dull for the most part. One of the things I spent quite a bit of time was whether other aspects of the brain might be commonly noted to have suffered as a result of retinopathy of prematurity. The whole idea of further unknown demons lurking in that department certainly gave me a chill or two. Were there other aspects of this which I simply never would have thought of? Other areas where my thinking was somehow altered by this? Thankfully, at least with a cursory look into it, the spacial intelligence/awareness part of the brain was the only thing that is apparently common. I read writing of a psychologist who suffered the same sort of problem and struggles with mobility which I have. I wish somebody had pointed me in that direction ages ago. The problem isn't going to go away. It'll always be an uphill battle learning to go places. At least now, I have a better grasp on why that is.

Adam and I will possibly go this week to see the new Star Trek movie. I wasn't in any kind of shape to go over and play games with him on Sunday. He didn't feel like going to see the film so we were at a nurd's impass. However, church was definitely a bright spot. I talked to some new people and generally feel like I'm making some headway on that front. Slowly, I'm geting more atuned to how the services go. There are at least a few voices I can recognise from week to week. Later in the afternoon, I was able to help Mom install the free Avast software and remove my old copy of AVG. Avast has certainly gotten some good press and it ought to be alright for her to use that. I just hope I'll be able to help if questions come up going forward. She also wanted some help with one of the casual games I found for her birthday. I showed her how to access forums and find threads where people discussed the game. That and give her a new thought which helped solve a puzzle she was stuck on. She's really enjoyed Madam Fate.

I'm still learning about the Eset Smart Security software I've chosen to use. It's doing quite well and I haven't had any issues over the past while. I used its learning mode to help more easily configure the firewall on both my netbook and desktop. Things are proceeding very smoothly on that front now. It almost never pops up to bother me. One of these days, I'll have to try controlling it with NVDA. It isn't as useable with Systemaccess as with Jaws. Not a big problem for now but I wouldn't mind making certain I have full control over it using a free screen-reader just in case. May as well check that out now. I've started reading Tapping the Dream Tree by Charles De Lint. Looks like it'll be an interesting collection of short stories. No news on the search for love other than having been contacted by a possible spammer. I'm not certain that's what she is yet but she's certainly not telling perspective guys much about herself. She just seems to expect them to somehow intuit that they're either interested in her or not. Very odd but figuring out whether or not she's genuine could provide some mild amusement. If she is a spammer, better she focuses on me than some poor totally despirate fool. It could also be some other situation such as a mental illness at work here. When I was a junior staff member at SCORE, Camp run by CNIB, the camp director told me that many of the essays they received were actually written by the parents of teens who weren't mentally capable of writing an essay themselves. They certainly couldn't get much out of the camp activities. The parents just wanted their child to be out of their hair for a week and perhaps have some different experiences. Understandable but very frustrating for the camp staff.