~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥
January 3, 2014

★~ Today’s Quote: I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know? ~ Ernest Hemingway

★~ Sleep Day:

Sleep Day revolves around rest and relaxation. It is an opportunity to sleep in, be lazy, doze, or nap for 20 minutes, 8 hours, or the entire day. The idea is to get recharged for the new year. The following are a few sleep tips:

Stick to the same bedtime and wake up time, even on the weekends.

A power nap may help you get through the day, but if you find that you can’t fall asleep at bedtime, eliminating even short catnaps may help.

Exercise daily.

Evaluate your room: Design your sleep environment to establish the conditions you need for sleep – cool, quiet, dark, comfortable and free of interruptions.

Make sure your mattress is comfortable and supportive.

Avoid bright light in the evening and expose yourself to sunlight in the morning.

Alcohol and cigarettes can disrupt sleep, try to finish eating at least 2-3 hours before bedtime.

Wind down. Your body needs time to shift into sleep mode, so spend the last hour before bed doing a calming activity such as reading.

If you can’t sleep, go into another room and do something relaxing until you feel tired.

★~ Fruit Cake Toss Day:

For those of you who are still holding on to that fruitcake from National Fruitcake Day (12/27), you are now officially permitted to toss it, according to fruitcake etiquette. Just watch out where you pitch that thing; they have been known to do some damage.

★~ Chocolate Cherry Day:

Last year we toasted the three kings on their travels to Bethlehem with a Chocolate-Cherry Martini Since eating small cherries, surrounded by chocolate, filled with some sort of thick syrup, on January 3rd was not very appealing.  We can make it a tradition and do it again.

Chocolate Cherry Martini 

★~ Today in History:

♥~ 1888 – Marvin C. Stone of Washington, DC  patented a drinking straw made out of paraffin-covered paper. It replaced natural rye straws. Austrian Marco Hort holds the record for holding the most drinking straws in his mouth -259- at one time.

♥~ 1959 –Alaska (49th state) entered the United States of America; capital: Juneau; bird: willow ptarmigan; flower: forget-me-not; nickname: The Last Frontier.

♥~1972 – Don McLean received a gold record for his 8-minute-plus (8:32) hit, American Pie.

♥~ 1987 – The first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was ‘Lady Soul’: Aretha Franklin.

♥~ 2007 – 14-year-old Mike Perham became the youngest person to sail solo across the Atlantic Ocean, reaching the Caribbean island of Antigua after a six-week voyage. The British teenager father followed in another boat.

★~ Born Today:

♥~ 1892 – J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien author of The Hobbit (1937) and the trilogy The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien went to Oxford, where he studied philology, the study of the origin of languages. His passion for language lead him to invent High Elvish, composed entirely of his own alphabet, sounds, and structure. Tolkien said he wrote  The Lord of the Rings, “to provide a world for the language.”

♥~ 1945 – Stephen Stills singer, songwriter, guitarist: group: Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth; group: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

♥~ 1946 – John Paul Jones (Baldwin) musician: bass: film score: Scream for Help; group: Led Zeppelin: Whole Lotta Love, Moby Dick, Ramble On, Immigrant Song, Since I’ve Been Loving You, Black Dog, Rock & Roll, The Battle of Evermore, Stairway to Heaven

♥~ 1956 – Mel (Columcille) Gibson Academy Award-winning director: Braveheart [1995]

♥~ 1950 – Victoria Principal actress: Dallas, Fantasy Island, Scott Turow’s The Burden of Proof, Naked Lie, Blind Witness, Mistress, Pleasure Palace, Earthquake, Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean

★~ Good to Know:

The Ancient Greeks believed that one fell asleep when the brain filled with blood and awakened once it drained back out. Nineteenth-century philosophers contended that sleep happened when the brain was emptied of ambitions and stimulating thoughts. “If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made,” biologist Allan Rechtschaffen once remarked. In Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (public library), journalist David K. Randall — who stumbled upon the idea after crashing violently into a wall while sleepwalking — explores “the largest overlooked part of your life and how it affects you even if you don’t have a sleep problem.” From gender differences to how come some people snore and others don’t to why we dream, he dives deep into this mysterious third of human existence to illuminate what happens when night falls and how it impacts every aspect of our days.

Most of us will spend a full third of our lives asleep, and yet we don’t have the faintest idea of what it does for our bodies and our brains. Research labs offer surprisingly few answers. Sleep is one of the dirty little secrets of science. My neurologist wasn’t kidding when he said there was a lot that we don’t know about sleep, starting with the most obvious question of all — why we, and every other animal, need to sleep in the first place.

But before we get too anthropocentrically arrogant in our assumptions, it turns out the quantitative requirement of sleep isn’t correlated with how high up the evolutionary chain an organism is:

Lions and gerbils sleep about thirteen hours a day. Tigers and squirrels nod off for about fifteen hours. At the other end of the spectrum, elephants typically sleep three and a half hours at a time, which seems lavish compared to the hour and a half of shut-eye that the average giraffe gets each night.

[…]

Humans need roughly one hour of sleep for every two hours they are awake, and the body innately knows when this ratio becomes out of whack. Each hour of missed sleep one night will result in deeper sleep the next, until the body’s sleep debt is wiped clean.

What, then, happens as we doze off, exactly? Like all science, our understanding of sleep seems to be a constant “revision in progress”:

Despite taking up so much of life, sleep is one of the youngest fields of science. Until the middle of the twentieth century, scientists thought that sleep was an unchanging condition during which time the brain was quiet. The discovery of rapid eye movements in the 1950s upended that. Researchers then realized that sleep is made up of five distinct stages that the body cycles through over roughly ninety-minute periods. The first is so light that if you wake up from it, you might not realize that you have been sleeping. The second is marked by the appearance of sleep-specific brain waves that last only a few seconds at a time. If you reach this point in the cycle, you will know you have been sleeping when you wake up. This stage marks the last drop before your brain takes a long ride away from consciousness. Stages three and four are considered deep sleep. In three, the brain sends out long, rhythmic bursts called delta waves. Stage four is known as slow-wave sleep for the speed of its accompanying brain waves. The deepest form of sleep, this is the farthest that your brain travels from conscious thought. If you are woken up while in stage four, you will be disoriented, unable to answer basic questions, and want nothing more than to go back to sleep, a condition that researchers call sleep drunkenness. The final stage is REM sleep, so named because of the rapid movements of your eyes dancing against your eyelids. In this stage of sleep, the brain is as active as it is when it is awake. This is when most dreams occur.

 (The role of REM sleep in regulating negative emotions.)

Randall’s most urgent point, however, is that in our blind lust for the “luxuries” of modern life, with all its 24-hour news cycles, artificial lighting on demand, and expectations of round-the-clock telecommunications availability, we’ve thrown ourselves into a kind of circadian schizophrenia:

We are living in an age when sleep is more comfortable than ever and yet more elusive. Even the worst dorm-room mattress in America is luxurious compared to sleeping arrangements that were common not long ago. During the Victorian era, for instance, laborers living in workhouses slept sitting on benches, with their arms dangling over a taut rope in front of them. They paid for this privilege, implying that it was better than the alternatives. Families up to the time of the Industrial Revolution engaged in the nightly ritual of checking for rats and mites burrowing in the one shared bedroom. Modernity brought about a drastic improvement in living standards, but with it came electric lights, television, and other kinds of entertainment that have thrown our sleep patterns into chaos.

Work has morphed into a twenty-four-hour fact of life, bringing its own set of standards and expectations when it comes to sleep … Sleep is ingrained in our cultural ethos as something that can be put off, dosed with coffee, or ignored. And yet maintaining a healthy sleep schedule is now thought of as one of the best forms of preventative medicine.

Reflecting on his findings, Randall marvels:

As I spent more time investigating the science of sleep, I began to understand that these strange hours of the night underpin nearly every moment of our lives.

Dreamland goes on to explore how sleep — its mechanisms, its absence, its cultural norms — affects everyone from police officers and truck drivers to artists and entrepreneurs, permeating everything from our decision-making to our emotional intelligence.

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We had some internet issues due to the storm, so I ran over to Starbucks to hit publish and treat myself to a tall white chocolate mocha, whole milk, with whip stirred. MMM. The sun is shining and the icicles hanging off my roof are awesome. Almost makes up for the -2F temp.

I need to make a Target run before I head home to my tail waggers, and hungry teens (sleep-over last night) but I will be back later with a few icicle pictures.

Sleep. Fascinating subject. Are you healthy sleeper? Or do you sleep on the fly. I’m sure you can guess which category I fall into, but I do love a sun nap in the afternoon for about 30 minutes.

Odd Loves Company!