Rewind about 10 days, and you’d find me lying in a hospital bed in Vancouver having just been wheeled out of the OR where I had my appendix removed… (of course, superbly timed immediately before I was planning on heading out to Squamish for some epic climbing with some epic people). Apart from being bummed out and sidelined from the fun stuff for the what’s left of summer, I have to say it’s pretty damn great to be Canadian. Diagnosis from 4 different doctors, ultrasound, surgury and a day in recovery. Total bill… $0!

Today… 10 days post-op, I’m back in Toronto and everything seems to be healing up nicely. The scar doesn’t look like it’ll be that bad (I hear chicks dig scars anyway), and it no longer feels like the world is going to end every time i sneeze. phew. my only pressing concern now is a moderately sized lump of scar tissue that seems to be forming in the tissue layer under the incision site. It basically feels like a giant knot. I’ve been told that’s pretty normal and with a bit of encouragement (kind words, dinners out, and the occasional massage) it will soften up and will eventually be unnoticable. I’ve also been told that whatever is left of my appendix is likely sitting in a bio-waste lab somewhere in Vancouver, and will continue to for the next 5 years. They apparently keep that stuff for legal reasons. How crazy is that?!?

I’ve given in to the hype. Not because I’m in love with Apple products or because I think the iPhone is the greatest thing ever, but because I needed a new phone, and the new iPhone seemingly fit the bill. This is my first Apple product, and I still think Win7 is one of the best operating systems around (Microsoft takes too much crap from Apple fanboys who have no idea how to use Linux, but brag about how OSX is based on it). That being said, I have to say that apart from a few annoyances, this thing is pretty impresive. In fact I’m composing this post entirely on my iPhone with the (so far, so good) WordPress app. The keyboard is great once you get used to the fact that it’s going to autocorrect all your frequent fat finger typos. But please Apple… please put an email push/fetch scheduler in the OS. Nobody wants to be woken up to viagra spam in the middle of the night, nor does anyone want to manually turn off email fetch every night. RIM offers it, Windows Mobile offers it, I’ll guess that Android probably does. Why cant you? This seems like a very simple feature oversight for what should be a mature product.

Hopefully this nice little app will give me a bit more incentive to blog more, but its pretty doubtful.

On a somewhat related note, I’m back from Vancouver, minus an appendix! More to come later…

Let me clear some misconceptions – if once in a while, you don’t get a good night’s sleep, you don’t have insomnia. You’re likely a perfectly normal (at least in the context of sleep) person and in most cases it’s just some external factors that prevented you from sleeping well that night. Insomnia ranges from transient to chronic, with periods lasting from a few days to a few years. Imagine how crappy you feel when you don’t sleep well one night – now imagine feeling like that day after day after day. Thankfully for me, I’d hardly describe my symptoms as chronic, but for most of my adult life, I’ve dealt with periods lasting anywhere from a few days to a month at a time. I grown to envy people who can hit a pillow and be snoring in under five minutes. Five minutes would be a miracle for me most nights, fifteen minutes would be down right impressive, and half an hour would be an average “good” night for me. A bad night, I could go to bed around 11pm, and still be rolling around trying to sleep at 2 or 3 in the morning, then from 3 to 7 in the morning, I’ll alternate between being asleep and being awake but it feels more like a mushy blend of both rather than one extreme or the other. Its like a screen saver on a computer screen: the monitor is still on and awake, but it’s not really doing anything particularly useful. Its not really saving an appreciable amount of energy, and it’s not at all being productive. Sometimes, like on my flight back from my recent trip to Vegas, I just decide to accept that was going to be in a semi-conscious state the rest of the night, and make the most of it – in this case, I threw on my iPod with and M83 album, and closed my eyes, and just tried to relax… a nice soothing soundtrack to distract me from the neverending stream of thoughts in my mind.

Before I elaborate on that, lets take a look at my lifestyle: I don’t drink a lot of alcohol, I do enjoy a drink here and there, but never to to get drunk (and to anyone who believes that alcohol is good for putting you to sleep, you’re terribly mistaken. It’s good for making you sleepy, but it’ll be an interrupted, dehydrated sleep). I don’t drink coffee at all, and in general I try to avoid caffeine. I love green tea, but have decaf whenever there’s a choice. Nutrition is important to me – I try to eat well, and I don’t eat out that often, and I try to have a good macronutrient balance in my meals. I take multivitamins and a B50 complex. I exercise regularly, which means that 6 days a week I’ll be either at the gym, playing volleyball, or in case you haven’t guessed… rock climbing. If I’m feeling particularly sore, or have some free time, I’ll throw a yoga session in there as well. I don’t have a stressful job – there are times that are more stressful than others, but most of the time I’m able to separate my work and personal life, and I rarely work more than 40 hours a week. You would think that at the end of the day, I could go home, lay down, and pass out.

So why doens’t it happen?

Back from my tangent – my mind never seems to shut off, and I’m a firm believer that in order to sleep, your mind, body, and spirit (for lack of a better word) have to be at peace. The visual imagery, the semi-conscious thoughts, the spatial awareness that leads to distraction of light and noise – it all masses together in a chaotic stream of distractions that enter my head and never leave. Ever had a song stuck in your head? Its kind of like that – whatever the last song I hear is, it’ll get stuck in my head until it gets replaced with something else. And even in a complete void of sights and sounds, I’ll latch on to something, real or imaginary and analyze it to death. An active mind won’t let the body get any rest.

Sleeping is an art. To some people it’s just a natural gift (cherish it!). To others it’s something that needs to be carefully orchestrated. Sadly the orchestration itself has to be an subconscious process, because if you’re anything like me, and you’re completely aware that you’re trying to sleep, your mind will focus on trying to sleep, rather than voiding itself of thought in order to encourage sleep. It’s a vicious cycle (which reminds me of the saying, “In order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion”). The good news however is that when things become routine, they become subconscious processes. Its the same reason you can be tired, but drive home perfectly safely, stop at every traffic light, signal at every turn, but upon arriving home, have absolutely no recollection of the drive itself. The act of driving somewhere is a very deliberate process, and similarly we (people who suffer from insomnia) need to train ourselves to become so good at tricking our minds into shutting down that we’re not even remotely aware that we’re doing it. People are creatures of habit, and for insomniacs, having a nightly decompression routine is vital to encouraging sleep.

Work backwards. Ideally we should all be getting about 7-8 hours of sleep. So if you need to be awake by 7am, don’t schedule your days to end at midnight, and then expect to fall asleep immediately. Give yourself 30-60 minutes to ease yourself into it – have some sort of regular and predictable routine to start. Read a book, watch some light hearted tv (nothing that’s going to make you think too hard), have a warm cup of some sleep-friendly herbal tea. Just make sure that you’re not in bed when you do so. In order for your routine to work, there needs to be a distinct progression from decompression time to sleeping time. The mind needs to interpret that when you go to bed, it’s because you’re going to sleep. I’ve been doing this for the past week and I have to say, I haven’t slept this well in months.  The other important thing to remember is that once you start feeling sleepy, don’t try to stretch out that extra chapter, or watch another epside of whatever…  you’ll lose your window of opportunity. Just as sleep occurs in cycles, I believe that opportunities to fall asleep come in cycles as well. If you feel sleepy, if you start to nod off early, embrace it. The biggest mistake that I regularly make is not calling it a night when I feel tired… maybe I’m just in denial that I’m getting old!

That’s all for me for now, but I’ll hopefully remember to revisit this post one day with some more thoughts.

In a market dominated by energy drinks, iChill promises to deliver the exact opposite. And why not, it’s just melatonin, valerian root, and some other goodies in a convenient (and probably overpriced) package. I’m not sure if it’s come to Canada yet, but I’ll definitely be checking it out next week when I return to the hideousness that is Vegas.

On a related note, if you’re in Toronto the weekend of the 26th to 28th, check out the Banff Mountain Film Festival. It’s guaranteed to impress, inspire, and leave you wondering why you’re sitting on your computer reading some obscure blog, while others are out there living their dreams.

What’s unique about Maui’s Haleakala is that it’s one of the few places in the world that you can drive from sea level to over 3,000M without leaving the comfort of an exceptionally well paved road (and an exceptionally “meh” Chevy Cobalt). By the time we got to the summit it was about 5:15 AM. Plenty of time to enjoy a quick snack, bundle up, and stake out a good spot to watch an absolutely spectacular sunrise. A thick hoody and my trusty softshell were all I had… I mean, it’s Maui, how cold could it get? Well, apparently temperatures at the summit often dip below freezing, not to mention wind strong enough to make a tripod somewhat useless on my very non-aerodynamic camera.

For anyone looking to make the trip (which I highly recommend), there are two very easily accessible places to see the sunrise, the summit, and the vistor’s centre. The summit is a very short drive or a 15 minute(?) hike up from the vistor’s centre and has a glass walled hut that you can take shelter from the cold in. There are parking lots at both locations, although space up at the summit is limited.

The best weather to watch the sunrise at Haleakala is often when it’s crappy at sea level. The glow of the cloud layer turns a rather uninteresting rising ball of light into a pretty incredible sight. We were also lucky enough to catch the moon low on the horizon shorly before the sunrise, which put a big smile on my face!

What’s rather unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on how you want to interpret it), is that after sunrise, most visitors drive back down the volcano, have an IHOP breakfast, and sit on a beach working on their melanoma the rest of the day. An easy 4km hike down the aptly named Sliding Sands Trail into the crater (and a frustrating 4km hike back up), is definitely worth it. The crater’s landscape is littered with sand, boulders, and giant cinder cones which make you feel like you’re on a completely different planet. I think in total we only descended maybe 500M vertical, but the loose sand and scree made the hike back up daunting despite the relatively low grade. I guess I’m just out of shape! I’ve said it so many times before, but I really need to start doing some cardio – I’ll put that on my NY’s Resolutions list.

Yah i don’t get it either.

Rocktoberfest itself was a blast as usual, and I can't say enough good things about it. This year's Reel Rock Tour screening was BigUp’s Progression, which has set new standards for ANY climbing movie. Incredible cinematography, awesome soundtrack, and, of course, phenomenal climbing sequences from Sharma, Caldwell, Usobiaga, and the wonderchild Ondra. If you haven’t seen this, why are you sitting around reading this… go watch Progression!

. . . and what kind of people would we be if we bailed early from RRG due to bad weather without an impromptu detour to Chicago for some of Gino’s East’s famous deep dish pizza. terrible people, terrible people. that’s right. i said it.