Whew! What a month

You wouldn't think that writing in simple sentence format would relieve you of the desire to write in a longer format, but it does. I don't think this is a good thing at all, as there is something very good about organizing your thoughts in small essays. Not only does it teach you essay structuring, it also helps you reach some kind of conclusion. And if it continues this way, what are we going to do? End up sending smiley faces back and forth instead of having healthy conversations?

While that's slightly interesting, it's part of the larger story of technology dumbing us down and taking away all of our time. From a personal standpoint, the last month has been exciting -- and I mean exciting in a bad way.

My mother died a couple of weeks ago. She had been sick for a while, but we thought we had a few more months with her. Since she had spent most of her time in Florida, this involved flying back and forth, multiple services, and all sorts of stress.

I'm trying to write up an eulogy for her, but taking somebody you knew for 44 years and putting them into blog article is nearly impossible. I'm going to do it, though, no matter how poor it ends up.

Death is part of life. As my mother kept telling me that her dad would always say, "Nobody lives forever"

The second thing was that I found out that I had a major health problem.

You know how when you're watching videos you can turn the volume up or down? Over the last several years, somehow my volume was turning down. I thought it was just getting older -- perhaps even an indication of early heart disease or something. I didn't think there was much that could be done about it.

I found out what was wrong by chasing another problem, my snoring.

For at least 15 years Melissa has told me I am a bad snorer. In addition, she told me that I would stop breathing at night -- gasping and struggling to breathe. Since I was unconscious at the time, I didn't know one way or another how much I snored or struggled to breathe. Seemed just like I was everybody else.

About a year or two ago, I realized that I couldn't breathe when I was sleeping -- as I fell asleep, when my airway relaxed, it would effectively strangle me. I would wake back up enough to flex my airway muscles and breathe. But eventually I would drift off to sleep anyway. When I realized what was going on, I figured it was time to see a doctor about it.

I finally got to see the doctor last month. He sent me for a sleep study, and the results were not so good. This is called sleep apnea. It's perfectly normal. Obstructive Sleep Apnea happens when you physically cannot breathe -- because of the way your head is constructed when you are unconscious your airway completely closes up.

If you have apnea that happens more than 5 times an hour, it's considered mild. Anything over 30 times an hour is considered severe.

On average, during the sleep study, I stopped breathing about 116 times per hour, which is four times the severe rating, or about twice a minute. At this rate, I was not sleeping at all, just passing in and out of light states of unconciousness as I woke up enough to breathe and then passed out again. I could "sleep" for 12 hours like this and wake up just as sleepy as when I went to bed -- or feeling even worse. My blood oxygen levels dropped down to below 70%, which is also really bad.

So I am now the owner of a Continuous Positive Airway system, or CPAP. If I'm unconscious, I need to be on the machine. The doc said i had a risk of "coding" because of the severity of my condition. I take it "coding" is not a good thing.

But with the box it's all fine now. I am going to look into surgery,. Being overweight doesn't help with this, but I have it to a degree that is completely out of proportion to my weight. I really don't want the surgery, but I think it's probably the best thing to do. I'm also going to buy a pulse-oximeter with recording functions and start tracking my blood oxygenation levels overnight. The tricky thing about this problem is that since you are sleeping, you don't really know you have it.

i sold my Jeep a couple of weeks ago. Really loved that Jeep, but it was time. I was never driving it, and it was time to move on.

Finally I picked up a new larger client, Alcatel-Lucent, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Other than that it's been mostly uneventful.