Nodding Off

For the last year or two, I have been nodding off whenever I could.  Drives Honey nuts, but I never considered it a problem until I almost fell asleep driving down the highway. 

Anyway, I took part in a sleep study over the weekend to see if sleep apnea is to blame. I didn't go into the sleep lab but did the whole thing from home.  We installed an app on my phone and matched it to a device that I taped to my index finger before going to bed.  It connected via Bluetooth and sent the information to the lab.

In the morning, after all the info was downloaded, the app had a short survey.  That survey was the only thing about the procedure that didn't make sense.  It asked:

• How long did it take you to fall asleep?  ____ minutes.
• How often did you wake during the night, and what time? ____
• Was this a typical night?  
• Did you wake more often? ___                                                                                               less often? ___                                                                                              about the same? ___

How in the heck am I expected to answer these questions if I am asleep?

Boquillas

 I first posted this eleven years ago - here, with some minor edits it is again.

Forty-something years ago, the summer after we married, Honey and I drove the MG Midget to Big Bend National Park for our first vacation together. 

We had been warned about flash floods, so when we saw thunderheads building while on a trip to Santa Elena Canyon, we made a detour to the “town” of Castolon. It seemed like a smart move at the time, but we actually ended up fording the deepest arroyo in the area, and once we stopped the car it would not start again.

The park service has a visitor center at Castolon now, but back then there was only a house for the single park ranger and a general store that catered to the Mexicans who waded across the Rio Grande to shop.  We ended up spending the night with a couple UT grad students who were living there for the summer, and in the morning, a Mexican mechanic helped us get the car going again.

In a corral behind the ranger’s house there were a bunch of sad-looking donkeys.  The ranger explained that they belonged to the wax smugglers who brought burro trains of chicle – the resin from the manilkara tree that is used in chewing gum – up through the park. 

When a burro was injured or starving and too weak to work, the smugglers would simply cut him loose.  The rangers would treat their wounds and feed them until they were well enough, then the smugglers would sneak in at night and steal them back.

Almost all US manufacturers of chewing gum have switched to artificial, petroleum-based wax for their gum, so the market for chicle has almost disappeared.  There is still smuggling going on in Big Bend, but it is not nearly so innocent, and it's gotten a lot more dangerous.