slowly winding down

Hello everyone. It's approaching eleven PM as I settle in for this blogging cession. Over the past while, my sleeping has steadily gotten worse. I hoped that I could stave off this insomnia with pure discipline, patience and perseverance. It's always such a boost to the ego when I manage to avoid having to use those Equate pills to nudge things back in the right direction. It would have been all the more a nifty ego boost now while I'm not getting much writing done. I would at least have conquered something. Sometimes though, that male machoism just sets us stubborn guys up for a rougher ride than if we let common sense prevail earlier. Thankfully, Equate isn't adictive or really all that powerful. It's a cheeper form of Gravol. I probably have that spellt wrong. Personally, I tend to want to deal with these things without resorting to pills out of some misplaced sense of fair play. This is one of those times when one must simply conceed the point and swallow both pills and pride. I need to be in as tip top mental shape as possible over the next chunk of time.

Yesterday, I spoke at my church about my journey to faith as a blind person and offered some observations and perspective as a blind person. All the feedback was quite positive. In fact, I may have an opportunity to speek at a Polish church later in the year. We had a guest worship team from there who apparently enjoyed my remarks. It's always a pleasure and an honour to do things like that. I certainly have a greater sense that I am indeed where God wants me to be. I'll be able to have some positive impact in the community over the years as people come to know me through opportunities like yesterday. It certainly seemed to cause some interesting people to pop out of the woodwork. I talked to one lady named Rose who is in the process of translating the new testament. Apparently, she'll be the first woman to actually do this. Other such efforts seem to have been performed by men. That surprised me greatly. You'd think that in this day and age, some woman or other would have crossed that gender boundary some time back in the fifties at the latest. She's also had some interesting experiences ministering to criminals. That might prove very useful when I begin working on orchestrating the evil forces in Enchantment's Twilight. Another lady who suffers from Parkinson's wants to start writing down her experiences for a possible blog or book. I'll be pleased to help her do this and determine how she wants to present her work online for people. Her name is Geneva. Thinking back, I can't recall having met anybody else named after a city.

PlentyofFish has also coughed up a very interesting lady. She's another teacher who doesn't seem nearly as prone to being scared off by too much information. We've exchanged a number of lengthy emails. So far, she doesn't seem interested in me commiting crimes for her. She does seem genuinely interested in my writing and in becoming friends. What's more, she lives close enough that it would be possible to actually go out somewhere together or have her come to visit me. That would certainly be a most welcome change.

Today has largely been a writeoff due to that lack of sleep I mentionned. I've swallowed my pills but am still feeling quite wide awake. I dozed off a number of times today so I'm rather glad I had no plans or deadlines just now. I watched U 571 on my computer for the first time with my Bose Companion3 speakers rather than my prior set of 5.1 surround sound ones. The main issue I had with those was that the sub-woofer fires sound downward into the floor. Moving into an apartment, I figured that because of this, those speakers might not be such a good idea. I've seen the movie Enemy Below and have no desire to inadvertently create the real thing. Fortunately, the Bose speakers have a subwoofer which fires forward rather than down. It ought to be less likely to wreck some poor soul's day. The virtual surround sound works quite well enough for me. Another item I took care of today was obtaining the manual for my grill. It took a while to track down the model on the site. However, they had a link to the pdf manual right there. Kurzweil1000 version 12 has just proved its worth by very quickly producing an accessible copy of the information for me. It took around ten minutes at most to recognise and present twenty-one pages. I don't think many of those pages were actually in English. However, I was quite happy to discover that even the tables with cooking times for food came through splendidly. Very nifty indeed. When I start scanning my regular mail in the new apartment, I don't anticipate any difficulties at all.

Over the weekend, I got together with Mark and Wendy. They have a table that I'll be borrowing for a while for the dining area until I get a better idea of what sise table will be suitable for the apartment. We had a very good dinner at the Lion Heart which I now have in my GPS. I have to remember to bring that along and keep adding landmarks of places when possible. Now that I'm going to be living here for the long term, it makes sense to do that. They'll be coming over on the saturday to help get me settled in. It's great to have such good friends as they are.

Hopefully, I'll be better rested tomorrow. It'll be time to start working with the talking microwave and perhaps take care of some other things like that router. I'm actually starting to feel tired so I believe I'll sign off before I go and write anything too obtuse.