In the garden, and RAIN!!!! by SIGNYM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

In the garden, and RAIN!!!!

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Tuesday, November 1, 2022 17:55
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VIEWED: 708374
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Thursday, October 28, 2021 4:10 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I guess you (BRENDA, SIX) pay for all that green with a lot of gloom and rain.

And snow!

Well, I hope you both stay snuggly warm and dry this year. I think the gloom and shorter days don't do either of you good, so maybe invest in a bright full-spectrum bulb for seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Price as low as $30

https://reviews.chicagotribune.com/reviews/best-light-therapy-lamps

It might help?

*****

In the meantime, I put away the light summer comforter and put the heavy one on the bed bc I was freezing my bits off a few nights ago! We have one hot day ahead of us - tomorrow- but then it starts to drop right back down again.

I remember a few years after my mom and stepdad moved to Arizona they told me about how "cold" it got by them and had to remind them of their roots.

It's been no higher than 58 degrees on my 2nd floor for a week, dipping as low as 54. I refuse to put the heat on until November, so that's my normal right now for the next 3 days anyhow. Except for when my brother comes in for Christmas, it's not going over 60 degrees this winter with the prices.

54 is a bit cold though, and I think that's why I so easily injured my back moving that A/C unit. It's even worse tonight after working yesterday and I'm having trouble sleeping because of it.

The good news I guess is that I've quickly acclimated to the cold weather outside because of it. It's hard to believe that we had a day that hit 90 just 3 weeks ago.

Not exactly sure what those lights functions are? I was expecting bulbs you'd put in one of your lamps. You'd put it on the coffee table or something?

Did you see the part of my last post about the water Sigs?

That large, deep hole where a post of the fence was removed near the garage of the foreclosure that somebody bought up to flip is filled with water and looks like a well. It's easily 20 to 30 feet inland from the street curb. This is 36 to 48 hours after we wrapped up around 3.5" of rain in 2 days.

My pump is still going off quite often.

Either there's major problems with that ditch across the street, or this is just how it always was.

But the good news is that I think what I saw behind me put to rest any worries that there's something wrong with my drainage. Our land is just saturated. As low as that hole in the ground is, the water level inside of it is probably at least 1 foot higher than my well is. Really hard for me to do anything more than guess about that though.

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Thursday, October 28, 2021 12:07 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I wish there was something could be done about that ditch. If it's leaking like a sieve, it's not really helping to move water off the land, is it?

My sis used to have CONSTANT flooded basement, coming up a floor drain, until the village got its act together and cleaned out a major storm drain and - Voila!- that stopped.

They still live in a swampy area, tho. I had to remind her that our dad had gotten permission to break into a storm drain, and installed a drain pipe in our backyard and across another backyard because every time it rained we'd have a mini-pond back there. (Clay soil) And, looking at the basement walls there is a water stain all the way around, about three courses up: Apparently the water table just rose and rose and rose one year.

So fixing the ditch won't solve all of your problems, but it might reduce them by about half.

well, anyway, the looooong gap between rainfall and the sump pump going off is telling me that the water at your foundation ISN'T coming from near your house. It's prolly just- as you say - a low spot and a high water table, contributed to by a bad drainage ditch.

Now, WE have an interesting problem that I'm going to have to get somebody to fix, bc it seems the soil has been washed out (possibly by an underground stream) and a bit of a sinkhole under one part of our sidewalk. The sidewalk has already bowed and cracked. Been so busy with other things I haven't had a chance to attend to it, but I know it'll need someone to look after it b4 the sidewalk cracks and collapses under one of us.

*****

Oh, about that light: Apparently people do respond neurologically and hormonally to light levels.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seasonal-affective-diso
rder/symptoms-causes/syc-20364651

When days shorten, some people switch from being active and engaged to being withdrawn and depressed. (Some people with bipolar disorder switch from being manic in the summer to being depressed in the winter.) If less light (brightness and wavelenght count!) is hitting your retina, you'll make less serotonin you and more melatonin.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-05-region-brain-responsible-season
al-affective.html

If you're one of the approximately 5% with seasonal affective disorder (SAD, "winter blahs") phototherapy can help, but you need to sit in front of the light - maybe reading - for a half-hour or so when you wake up to kick-start your brain.

Also, some people have difficulty getting regular sleep. Once they've done all of the sleep hygiene things (yanno, regular bedtimes; cool, dark, comfortable room; not drinking coffee or alcohol in the hours before bed; not staring at a screen an hour beore bedtime) then getting bright light regularly in the morning helps re-set the brain clock. It's also supposedly good for people who travel a lot and suffer from jet lag.

I can't vouch for all of this; it's just what I've read and observed in others.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

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Thursday, October 28, 2021 4:07 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Oh BTW, "monitors" tend to emit a lot of blue light (unless it has a sleep mode) and it's blue light that tends to wake ppl up. That's why sleep specialists recommend shutting down your "screen time" at least an hour before bed.

Maybe one cheap way to avoid SAD is to attend to your "screen time" with your first cuppa?

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

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Thursday, October 28, 2021 4:20 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I myself have created and instituted a routine I call 'early daylight therapy'. It involves sitting outside for half an hour in the morning and drinking tea or coffee, the sooner after the sun rises, the better. My theory is that the light exposure helps reset my biological clock - and that if I get a strong WAKE UP signal at an appropriate time, I'll have a better SLEEP NOW signal at night. So far it seems to be working. When free-running, my daylengths were anywhere from 36 - 52 hours long before I felt any need for sleep. But that's a REALLY messed up schedule to try to fit into the rest of the world! Now I regularly get sleepy at night and do get to sleep easily. It's still pretty late for a regular bedtime, but I think I can adjust that by getting out earlier than I usually do. Also, it's important to get out as early as possible, even though the light spectrum in the AM is biased from blue (those rosy pink sunrises), since timing (earlier is better) is important. And there's plenty of blue light INTENSITY to go around outdoors, even during the early AM, even on a cloudy day, even if you sit in the shade! And it's the blue light that does the trick.

Being outdoors beats any indoor light therapy by a lot because the natural intensity of the sun is so much greater than any light box, and you're not tethered to a small area in front of a box when you're outdoors.

Light boxes used to be fluorescent, and maybe some still are. But to get a lot of light into a compact space, many vendors used folded fluorescent tubes. It was hard to get an even phosphor coating on the inside of those complicated bent shapes. (The phosphor coating is what emits visible light when the gas inside is excited and emits UV light.) And with many breaks in the phosphor coating that would normally absorb the UV light, that meant they leaked a lot of dangerous UV light out of them. Even though you're not supposed to look directly at the light, the emitted UV does reflect off of surfaces. And that is especially dangerous for the eyes, since one sits so close to the light source.

Newer and better light boxes use LEDs.

But getting outside is so much cheaper, and easier.

BTW, on the backside - there's been much made of exposure to artificial blue light at night from TVs, phone screens, and computer monitors. However, as one gets older, the lenses in your eyes become yellow - they absorb blue light and let the yellow light through. Because significant amounts of blue light get absorbed in older people, blue light exposure at night might not be so important for them - or us.

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Thursday, October 28, 2021 5:37 PM