Friday 5 for January 20: Now I lay me down

Late start for 2023. My first Friday 5 Answers for the new year... The Year of the Rabbit today.

Hello, and welcome to this week’s Friday 5! Please copy these questions to your webspace. Answer the questions there; then leave a comment below so we’ll all know where to check out your responses. Please don’t forget to link us from your website!

1. What keeps you up at night?

Apps on my smartphone... podcasts, music, audiobooks, video. Ugh... blue light disease.

2. How well do you operate on insufficient sleep?

I need to take a nap around 2:00 in the afternoon. Now I can't. So I have to try and get at least 5 hours of sleep the night before...

3. Under what conditions do you get your best sleep?

Probably when I have two bad days in a row of little or no sleep. At the end of that period I can zonk out fairly well... smartphone be damned.

4. What unusual places have you slept in?

A darkroom... long, long ago... you know a place where there is no light and you are supposed to develop film and process photos...  Homeless.... three weeks straight..... long ago. Other than that, one night in a 1985 Toyota Tercel.... 

5. What’s a good song about dreams or dreaming?

There are plenty of dreams or dreaming songs... Here are a few in no particular order....

• Dreams - Fleetwood Mac
• Dreaming - Cliff Richard
• Dream On - Aerosmith
• All I Have to Do is Dream - The Everly Brothers
• Dream Lover - Bobby Darrin
• Dream Baby - Roy Orbison
• Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) - Eurythmics
• Blue Hawaii - Elvis Presley ... dreams come true in Blue Hawaii.
• Dreamlover - Mariah Carey
• Your Wildest Dreams - The Moody Blues
• #9 Dream - John Lennon
• Girl of my Dreams - Bram Tchaikovsky

I hope you enjoyed the music. Sweet dreams!

Friday 5 for July 7: Grabby

Questions from Scivener's weekly Friday 5 blog.

1. There’s a convenience store nearby and you have a small case of the munchies. What do you grab?

Lately a granola bar like the one pictured above.

2. You’re about to get on a plane and someone just stole all your reading material, but there’s a newsstand nearby. What magazine (of likely available titles) do you grab?

Who buys magazines these days? They cost at least $5 a pop not the $2 of years gone by. The internet has free stuff you can read, but of course the damn thing don't work on many flights. Of course you can always download a book or PDF file of some sort to read on your device. Or maybe even listen to a podcast. Plenty of stuff to keep you entertained and informed while on a plane.

3. On a regular work day, where do you grab lunch and what do you get if you don’t bring a lunch from home?

I don't have much time for lunch, so the granola bar (above) is a substitute.

4. Instead of a lunch, you decide you need a quick nap during your workday. Where can you grab 40 winks?

We'd be fired if we slept on the job. :O

5. How close to your head is your cell phone when you’re asleep in bed?

Today's smart phones are pretty much internet access devices and digital cameras more than they are a phone, so yeah, they are close by so you can get news, information or entertainment. Mine is on the night table connected to a long charging cable.

I purposely leave the damn thing at home when I don't want to be bothered. For emergency use I do carry around an out of commission Alcatel phone that can still do emergency 911 calls.

Friday 5 for February 24: REST

"Hello, and welcome to this week’s Friday 5!  Please copy these questions to your webspace.  Answer the questions there; then leave a comment below so we’ll all know where to check out your responses. Please don’t forget to link us from your website!"

1. When did you last need a few days of complete rest and nothing else?

Last year I needed a lot of rest while recovering from open heart surgery. I had to slowly ramp myself up back to life by eating healthier and walking more. Today I can say that I am happy to be alive with a new lease on life.

2. How do you keep yourself occupied when you have to be in bed all day and night?

The internet always keeps me occupied whether I am in bed or not. I do use it a lot if I am confined to bed. Luckily we have many ways to access the net beyond desktop and laptop computers. Smart phones and tablets makes it easy to consume internet content while in bed. I tend to read a lot of news websites, tech blogs, do some book reading on Kindle and Google Play books, listening to music, podcasts, audio books and watching videos. There are always the old school standbys such as TV (which I currently don't have), books, magazines, newspapers, and audio media (record player, CDs, radio). With all that stuff accessible to us who has time to rest? Fortunately some of it actually helps me to fall asleep... anyone for Enya?

Other than consuming media, there is the necessity of food consumption and yes, rest too!

3. Who do you most want to hear from when you have to withdraw to your bed for a few days of rest?

It is tough being a single person when you are down and out and need rest. As a single person you still have to do a lot of core things yourself like eating, cleaning up, shopping, etc. which forces you to get out of bed even if you may have to stay there. So hats off to those individuals who have a reliable and loving spouse, room mate or companion. That all said singles like myself sometimes have to rely on friends or relatives for help, especially if your parents have gone to the great beyond.

4. What adverse effects have you experienced while staying in bed for a few days?

It would depend on the reasons why bed rest was required. The following examples come to mind:

Flu - fever, run, vomiting, tummy aches, feeling lousy, coughing

Heart surgery - pain, weakness, lack of movement, constant sleep interruption while hospitalized, lack of privacy, noise, slow recovery, relapse, coughing, grumpiness, dreariness, etc.

5. When you first notice a few symptoms, are you more likely to shut everything down right away, or try to power through until you don’t have a choice anymore?

Always usually power through until I can't take it... then boom! Stuck in bed.

"Thanks for participating!  And have a healthy weekend!"

Always trying!

Friday 5 for March 26 - Sleep

Listening to music on iTunes sometimes put me to sleep.

1. How many hours’ sleep do you need in order to be at your best, and what’s the minimum you can get on a regular basis and still be functional?

8 hours is ideal, however 5 to 6 is ok.

4 hours just makes it, and anything under that is not so good.

2. What’s your favorite sleeping position?

Lying down.

3. What was the cause of your most recent difficulty sleeping?

Coughing due to a bad cold last month.

4. When you can’t seem to drift off to sleep right away, what are some things you do to bring about sleep?

Listen to late night talk radio or music on my iTunes/Power Mac G4.

5. When did you last doze off at an inappropriate time or in an inappropriate place?

Recently for a few minutes at work.... mostly nodding off.