Post something that made you HAPPY today.

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I managed to resist buying those Monster Zeros at the supermarket. I bought a 1 litre bottle of Coke Zero that I'm taking my time drinking.

Ahh, Halloween. I remember growing up in the 70s when the Halloween decorations were simple cardboard cutouts of witches and skeletons we taped to the windows. Something my friends and I loved to do back then was play a scary Halloween record with the lights out. I wonder how many kids do that today?

A few days ago I climbed a rock (Rocca di Bismantova).
It wasn't easy because I'm recovering from a bad fall: but I managed to climb all the way up.

We arrive and see a tightrope walker!
My thoughts immediately go to the Twin Towers (a relative of mine, a manager, was in one and survived), before the disaster.

And Phillippe Pétit: who crossed them eight times on a 3cm-thick cable.

I remember seeing him rehearsing between two trees.

It's not easy; it requires incredible balance.
As well as not having a fear of heights.

And remarkable psychological and physical training.

And enormous talent and the gaze of a dreamer.

If you read his story, you'll find yourself in a dream with a beautiful ending.

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An Italian boy from the Italian-speaking Swiss canton, he did it.

He was nice.
He was amazed by the crowd.

I commented: "They're watching him to see if he'll fall, but he won't fall, he has a safety cable anyway."

Afterward, he was alone. I complimented him. I love heights, and there was no wind there.
When I go to my region, I climb many meters.
And the wind is very strong.
It seemed easy to stay there; my brother is afraid of heights.

He said to me: "Stay further away from the edge."
But I was confident about my support, even though I wasn't in great physical shape after the fall.

I looked down, then I went to where he was before.

From there, it seemed less scary; I perceived it from a different perspective.

There was no cable, just a special 3-centimeter strip of flat material, then the safety cable, of course.

I asked him if he had done yoga.

He smiled (he was very nice) and said yes, but not enough.

I didn't want to hold him back, especially since my conversations would have gotten mixed up with his and I might not have been able to get through it.

I greeted him: he smiled and waved.
I heard an absurd comment: when is Halloween, he asked?

One replied at the end of November

He was Mexican.

He tried too, but with terrible results.

Halloween: it's a very heartfelt holiday here.

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I don't know what the children do.
Nor the less childish ones: here, the generations have become shorter in time, and there's a huge gap even between them. I think the average is every three years, there's a huge difference.

The French acrobat I wrote about was special.

Read his biography.
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"Man of the air, you color with blood the sumptuous hours of your passage among us. Limits exist only in the soul of those who lack dreams"
(P. Petit, Treatise on Tightrope Walking, Ed. Ponte alle Grazie 1999)

when my sister came, she did not have the nerve to micromanage me.

all three buses came quickly.

slept 9-5 great. then one hour nap spectacular.

sister bought me a rainsuit.

I did it! I celebrated my first holiday without coffee or an energy drink.

Kitty and coffee

I went bowling with a small group of people from my clubhouse.

Diane Keaton's Charmingly Chaotic Interview On "The Colbert Report"

random little gifts from neighbors (other), eggs money liquor

Just visited the doctor and discovered that Melatonin is no longer prescription only (I wish I’d asked him earlier as he seems in favour of it, unlike every other quack I’ve asked, who then became suddenly deaf…).

I was off to a good starts; the spray he’d given me did a good job of getting rid of the dry tickly cough that had been plaguing me for months (so why didn’t he give it to me sooner? It all seems a bit hit and miss, doesn’t it?).

Anyway, I hunted around some pharmacies, finding the usual blend of Melatonin plus a witches brew of sundry plant extracts, which interested me not at all (the french have “plant extracts” and “essential oils” for every ailment under the sun, as well as creams specially developed to burn the fat from one body part or another)! The other put-off is the prescribed dose, of 1,9 mg, which plain doesn’t work; the minimal effective dose is 3 mg, as you’ll find in the USA etc, so I imagined prescriptions were needed to get a proper dose.

Not so, as it transpires; when I found just plain Melatonin by itself, it was the same dose. Happily, that was the cheapest available (plus 50%, special offer) so I loaded up.

No longer having a persistent cough will have adelphe, but it can only be the Melatonin that gave me the best night’s sleep I’ve enjoyed in years.

So why are we repeatedly told that it has no such effect? For starters, the studies made were of whole populations, with no attempt to establish whether they were deficient in Melatonin or not, which absolutely stinks!

I’d best explain here how it works: Melatonin is what’s referred to as a cascade hormone, which is to say that it acts as a trigger to release other hormones (the ones that actually help you to sleep, among other things). Once that’s done, there is no point taking more; once those agents released have gone, they then take a lot of time to replenish.

You can think of it as a snow ball that sets off an avalanche; it needs to be big enough, but making it even bigger has no further effect.

So why the antagonism to its use, and the warnings about exceeding the prescribed dose?

Well, it’s no secret that governments are more than willing to boost big pharma profits, at the cost of their voters, but that doesn’t really work here; Melatonin is cheap and easy to make, so hard to repress, and alternatives like sleeping pills are generally known to be dangerous, so unlike diet pills, say, only the suicidal (a shrinking market) are likely to buy them in large quantities.

So consider this; if you look at aspie or autistic chat sites, it soon become clear that many of us are night owls. We are also notorious as being late to rise, a real handicap in a world run by those who think morning is the best time of day, and who impose their preferences on the rest of us.

Why do we differ? There’s another pointer here to the possibility of Neanderthal influence (another thing that’s currently impossible to prove, but for which there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of indicators).

Imagine life for early man in Africa, where any stressful activity was best done in the cool of the morning, whereas for Neanderthals in their often arctic conditions, getting out of bed early had no virtue whatsoever; better to wait until things warmed up a bit, doing only those strenuous activities which can be done under blankets.

What we have is the primordial warfare between different peoples; the early morning types will not miss any opportunity to screw Autistics just because we are different!

How else can on explain the mess that’s been made of autism research, or how autistic children are the only class of human for which aversion therapy (ABA) is legal? Or how the autism research establishment ignore the historic meaning of Autistic that Kanner and many others understood, long before it became synonymous with “having autism”? Or how every magazine article on Neanderthals, regardless of content, always ends with a paragraph assuring us that they are wholly extinct?

How safe is Melatonin? It has been researched repeatedly as a potential aid to sufferers of AIDS, cancer and others, in multi gram doses (yes, thousands of time more than the sleep aid function) for many decades; there are over 150 papers published on the subject, and not a single one of them has reported an undesirable side effect from Melatonin! It must be about the safest medicament ever!

To sum up: if your sleep is troubled or irregular, give Melatonin a try. Just 3mg does the job (there’s nothing gained by taking more) and represents no risk whatsoever.

I woke up to see another day.

Thinking about my kitty and coffee

Given my irregular sleep patterns in recent years, there were times I wasn’t sure of that! On a couple of instances, I found myself half way to my morning shop, wondering why it was getting darker. I can't remember if it affected my hapiness at all...

Art club, art club, tra la laa la la!

Kitty memories Coffee

I went out with my wife after dark with my 20x80mm binoculars and saw Comet Lemmon.

I need to get back into astronomy. I have a Celestron Ultima 8 PEC Schmidt cassegrain and a Towa 80mm long focus refractor (marketed as a Sears brand) that I need to get out of their crates and gaze the heavens like I used to do.