life
personal development, “life hacks”, all around quality of life improvement
i have been reading about biphasic or segmented sleep schedules and am rather curious about trying it again. this forum has a lot of good information on starting such a difficult routine. it also contains a lot of information and success stories from people who have changed over to this schedule.
when my daughter was born in 2009, i operated for the first 3+ months of her being home on a polyphasic sleep schedule. simply because she was up every couple hours to feed. so essentially i was sleeping for 2 hours then awake for 30min to feed her. typically i would go to bed around 23:00 and be up around 05:00. this gave me 4 hours of sleep per night and i would usually take about a 1 hour or more nap in the later afternoon. (as any parent can tell you, sleep when you can when it comes to a newborn)
the past several months i have noticed a decrease in mental and physical performance on my behalf, and i think this is simply due to a monophasic sleep pattern. any night i sleep for 7.5+ hours i wake up tired and sluggish, and it typically takes me a better part of 15 minutes to motivate myself. i am typically fine throughout most of the day, however, i find in between 16:00 and 18:00 i slow down and become rather sluggish and have no motivation to work or do anything. this proves to be quite and issue, simply because between 17:00 and 18:00 i am very busy with my family.
my current routine hardly varies, unless i stay up later working on a project or playing wow. so adjusting to a biphasic sleep schedule shouldnt be all that difficult.
my current dilemma is when to take the nap. i have considered taking one after the kids go to bed, which would result in a nap from 20:00 – 21:30 [give or take 30min] then i would get my core sleep from 01:00 – 06:00. one of the other options i have been considering is starting the nap between 11:00 and 12:00. this way i would nap during work hours and have more time in the evening. both options have their positive benefits. the latter may prove to be the most viable option, simply because i work for myself and i would be able to make up time lost during the day working at night, while my family is sleeping.
a swing set a couple of my friends and i put together for my wifes daycare. it isn’t finished yet, i still need to put the lower clubhouse walls on and the back picnic bench part. (i took the pictures with my blackberry, so they are a little grainy)
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my wife and i wanted a new entertainment center and we didnt really have the extra money for it. so i set out to build one. here are a couple pictures of what i came up with. it was built out of scrap wood my dad and i had lying around in his wood shop. some of it came from projects at shiloh chapel (the face frame in particular is all wood from shiloh, all 90+ years old). the doors are made out of yellow pine, and i am not too fond of them, and will be making new ones either this week or next.
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last year, for my wifes birthday, i made her a coffee table. i took some wood out of a building i was working on that was built in 1803. most of the wood for the table is 150+ years old. on the bottom, there is a carving of a ship, this particular piece of wood was found inside a wall in one of the oldest parts of the building. below are a couple pictures i took of it. i took pictures of it while i was making it but it appears i have misplaced them. when i find them i will be sure to post them here.
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go here for a few photos of the building. they are before and after renovation pictures.