Melatonin experiments

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Last night I came across a pop-science video about the link between ADHD and sleep disruptions, and it raised an interesting point: many of the ADHD symptoms are also symptoms of sleep deprivation, and the sleep disruption aspects of ADHD might actually be the underlying cause of many of them.

I’ve always had great difficulty with sleep, with trouble falling asleep at night but then being incredibly fatigued during the day. And I can’t help but wonder how many of my other issues are just plain due to crappy sleep. Maybe my chronic pain isn’t because of an underlying neurological cause, but is because I’m not properly sleeping and healing at night?

I’ve had three sleep studies at this point. The first in-home study vaguely diagnosed me with obstructive apnea, and is why I got a CPAP machine. The CPAP machine didn’t help at all, so a second study to rule out narcolepsy happened. Then the third one verified that CPAP doesn’t actually make a difference for me.

Anyway, one of the things mentioned in the video is that there’s been some success with treating some forms of childhood ADHD with time-release melatonin. So starting tonight I’m going to try taking time-release melatonin and see if that helps me any.

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[excitement intensifies]

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The previous owner of the house — the daughter-in-law of the previous occupant — reached out to me on Facebook, and we got to chatting about the neighborhood, the house, and a bunch of other stuff. She was incredibly welcoming, and it turns out that she also lives in the neighborhood. She seems really friendly, and she’s looking forward to seeing what I do with the place. And so am I!

My brain just won’t let me not keep on planning what I’m going to do in terms of the move. I’ve already scheduled a move consultation to see how much it’ll cost to get a full-service pack-and-move, and I’m beginning to triage my possessions and plan for where they’re going to go in the house (or, if not, whether to sell them on eBay or Craigslist, or simply donate them). I’m also hyper-fixating, as usual, on how I’m going to set up my recording studio, my network, and a bunch of other things.

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toxicity update

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Unsurprisingly yet unfortunately, the podcast which triggered this recollection about one of its consultants ended up just having its own reckoning about internal systemic bias and workplace toxicity, brought about when they did a series about another toxic, systemically-biased workplace.

It’s almost like this stuff is rampant, or something…

The joys of house hunting

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Wow, I’m really glad I recently switched from pay-by-the-mile insurance back to traditional monthly insurance. My car’s been getting a lot more activity in the last few weeks (and the monthly rate on my insurance is lower than the base rate on the by-the-mile anyway).

Which is to say I’ve been driving around a lot to look at quite a few places. Some of them have been pretty interesting. Others have been… “interesting.”

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Balance

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Stuff I want to work on:

Stuff I need to work on:

  • The day job
  • Finding a better housing situation than my current condo

Stuff I have the energy to work on:

  •  

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ugh meds, ugh work

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I’ve been on guanfacine for about a month now, and I still haven’t stopped feeling drowsy and tired all day, to the point that I’ll often just fall asleep in the middle of things. Even when I’m doing things like grocery shopping I’ll suddenly feel really tired and need to take a couple moments to brace myself. It’s almost like it’s causing narcolepsy or something.

Last week I talked about this with my psychiatrist and we decided to try combination therapy with strattera, a stimulant-based med, since my ADHD responded well to the Adderall (aside from my blood pressure spiking badly).

So far, it hasn’t been helping at all. I’m getting the panic and anxiety from stimulants, while also being drowsy all day. What’s even worse is I’m also getting frequent muscle spasms, which is apparently a common reaction to some ADHD meds. And ironically, the treatment for that? Guanfacine.

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PSA regarding quotes in isso

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After my recent isso updates, I found that double-quotes had disappeared from most peoples' comments, and it was really weird and I couldn’t figure out why.

Anyway, long story short, it turns out that something changed to cause the EXT_QUOTE support to start converting "s into <q>s, and isso’s HTML sanitizer (which runs after Markdown conversion) isn’t configured to allow that as an HTML element. (Or maybe this was happening all along and I just didn’t notice until now! Nothing in Misaka has changed in that time so I probably just never noticed.)

The fix is to either remove quote from options or add q to allowed-elements in the [markup] section of the isso config file. For example, here’s that section of mine:

beesbuzz.biz.cfg
[markup]
options=strikethrough, autolink, fenced-code, no-intra-emphasis, superscript, highlight, quote, tables
allowed-elements=mark, sup, sub, q

On a related note, don’t enable EXT_QUOTE on Publ if you want quotes to be able to appear in auto-generated entry summaries and the like. (I suppose I should change Publ to always override the Markdown extension configuration where it makes sense…)

webmention.js 0.4.0

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I’ve just released v0.4.0 of webmention.js, which adds the ability to coalesce comment-type responses into the “reactions” section. I’d been considering it for a while but finally got the impetus to add it during today’s Respectful Responses IndieWeb session.

This change shouldn’t break current users of webmention.js, as it’s an opt-in configuration value.

As an aside, I really need to get around to making an actual site for PlaidWeb, so I have somewhere to put non-Publ discussion and release announcements.