recent developments in the cultivation of sleep

August 16, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's looking for a way to put some outdoor string lights up on the deck and is starting to brainstorm wildly in its idle moments 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNow that Quentin's back at preschool, maybe I'll have time to put the new episode together?? Maybe I should just think about taking a Newborn-Induced Hiatus for a while. This is probably the more realistic way to go, huh. Look on the bright side: there's a healthy back catalog waiting for you if you haven't gotten on board yet!I've been to the future and I'm here to report that the only people still alive after the aliens invaded are the ones who left a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on our Apple Podcasts page. Go do it now or await your fate in the alien food mills!!Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberI'll be honest: I don't know if the Delta variant has fucked our plans for November 11th's return of Instant Band Night. At this point I'm assuming everyone reading this has gotten their shot, so what's left to do but wait, cross our fingers, and also run through the streets forcibly vaccinating everyone we can get our mitts on? I'll see you out there.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Not much to report here this week; next week we're moving to a new house about a mile away (still within range of Quentin's lovely preschool), so there's a lot to get done. Big credit to Mavis for organizing our tasks in a spreadsheet so we can easily see what needs doing and by who; she's done this for our other moves, too, and it's a goddamn lifesaver. I like to think of myself as an organized person, but I'm a toddler struggling with the concept of crayons while she's over here painting museum-quality masterpieces in 4K resolution. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.For the past two weeks, Quentin's been on summer break from his little Montessori preschool, which as you can probably imagine was A Lot To Handle while also dealing with a baby. Today was his first day back, and my fingers are crossed just as hard as possible that it's all gone well. His kidney thing made a minor reappearance, so we've put him back on a relatively high dose of prednisone on the advice of his nephrologist to sort it out, which makes his Big Feelings a lot bigger; there was some crying at dropoff today, but he did express a wish to wave bye-bye to me while I also waved at him, so it wasn't like he wanted to go home or for me to stay forever, which I count as a win.We're figuring out Felix's nighttime feeding/sleep situation. Right now it's looking something like:(All times are approximate)7p: Nurse730-930p: Felix sleeps?????*930p: NurseImmediately after: Mavis goes TO BED10p-130a: Felix sleeps**130a: Felix awakens and gets a bottle (and Mavis can continue to sleep)***2a: Try to put Felix back down for more sleep****2a-5a: Felix sleeps????5a: Nurse530a: Return Felix to the co-sleeper for more attempted sleep6a: Quentin awakens and one of us must begin the dayAfter breakfasting and playing and delivering Quentin to preschool, the rest of the morning is an overlapping series of naps and Felix-feedings until lunchtime, at which point we've usually built up enough sleep that we can begin going about the tasks we've set for ourselves. It works right now; we'll see what the next stage of Felix's development looks like.* We're still working out the formula that will lead to successful Felix sleep during this interval, but it seems to involve putting him in the Ergo baby-wearing device that I called the Autosnuggler during Quentin's infancy until he falls asleep, then waiting x minutes to decant him into the Pack & Play we set up in the family room. Determining x has been the real question mark, though with persistence we're usually able to succeed eventually. Judicious application of the pacifier can help at this stage (as it does at all stages), although the trick is still to see if he can keep it in his gob long enough, which 4 out of 5 times he can't.** For this stretch, he sleeps in the Pack & Play and I sack out on the couch next to it. This has worked surprisingly well, mostly because the couch is comfortable and also I'm very tired.*** We've been told by the pediatricians that Felix's growth has been great, so we're authorized to just let him sleep as long as he wants and feed him whenever he wakes up, as opposed to waking him up every 3h for feeding. The 130a wakeup is something that would be great for him to phase out, and I'm hoping it'll happen eventually, but I have a faint worry that because he's such an accomplished eater, maybe he's become a Hungry Boy who's become accustomed to his regular good meals? Is that silly?**** This phase marks the return of Felix to our room and the miniature crib-like co-sleeper we put next to the bed. Felix likes to make sounds during this stretch that make it seem like he's trying to bust out of his sleep swaddle, even though it's not tight by any stretch of the imagination and we've learned to leave his arms free. 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.

  • "Vaccine Refusers Risk Compassion Fatigue: After the horrors that health-care workers have endured during the pandemic, many are struggling to sympathize with people who won’t protect themselves." This one's from a doctor in NYC. (~$Atlantic) Pair that with this one, which is more data-based; the first sentence kinda says it all: "The vaccinated, across party lines, have kind of had it with the unvaccinated, an array of new polls suggests." (~$Atlantic) Finally, here's good ol' Ed Yong on "How the Pandemic Now Ends". (~$Atlantic) 

  • Just because that first item was getting a little bloated: if you didn't read that Twitter thread from Professor Brooke Harrington about why convincing anti-vaxxers is so hard and how to maybe get it done, I linked a couple issues ago, she wrote an article version of it for the Guardian. (Guardian) 

  • Here's a little personal perspective from someone who's hit what she calls her "personal climate tipping point." (~$Atlantic) The political realities around what it'll take to put the brakes on the warming train are a little stark. (The Conversation) Relatedly: how do we avoid tumbling into a pit of nihilistic despair over climate change? (Vox) 

  • NASA wants to send some people to Fake Mars for a year to see how they'd hold up, and they're not planning on making it easy. (Gizmodo) 

  • Facebook's dragging its feet on the whole "dealing with vaccine misinformation that's killing people by the bucketload" problem. (~$NYT) 

  • Engineers have developed an algorithm that trains drones to fly quickly and nimbly through obstacle zones, which has strong applications in search & rescue. (MIT) 

  • You know that thing where you're in the middle of hanging out with someone and they just take out their phone and start scrolling? Who does that and why? Researchers are on it. Please note that I have no opinion on their repeated attempts to make up new lingo. (U of Georgia) 

  • Nobody knows why the vaccine cards are the wrong goddamn size. (~$Atlantic) 

  • There's a growing pile of scientific evidence that while it's still rudimentary compared to you and me, certain animal species' understanding of math is more complex than we thought. (Quanta) 

  • Is Cory Doctorow right about Uber? Probably? Either way, this is an entertaining read, for certain values of "entertaining." (Pluralistic) 

  • Unvaccinated America in five charts. (538) 

  • Somewhere around 10-30% of black bears in British Columbia have white fur (they're called "spirit bears" by their indigenous neighbors), which paradoxically makes them harder to see from a fish's POV, so they eat better than their darker brethren. (Hakai) 

  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who believe in social Darwinism tend to be fucking assholes. (PLOS via Science Daily) 

  • I picked up the impression somewhere that Bored Panda is basically a content chum bucket, but I have to admit this listicle of 35 good backyard pandemic makeovers is pretty nice. (Bored Panda) 

  • A recent analysis suggests we might want to rethink perceived wisdom about when our metabolism starts to slow down. (Pennington Biomedical Research Center) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Marketing Department, All the Terror Your Hands Can Hold 

Thanks

If you've read this far, I thank you. Feel free to forward this to someone you like, or inflict upon someone you don't.