Insomnia

Those of you who know me know that I do my best design work at night. For whatever reason I can be much more productive after 8pm than I can during daylight hours... and although I may spend a whole day trying to get design-type things accomplished, I seem to just be flailing about until evening. It's just the way my body works, and I've always been like this... even in high school I would half-doze through the school day, come home and take a nap (my mom would usually yell at me to wake up because she didn't understand why I was asleep in the middle of the day), eat dinner with the family, then be wide awake and ready to socialize and study until 2 or 3 in the morning, when I'd catch a couple hours of sleep before starting all over again.

Well, I lost out on a lot of productivity time over the weekend with that wretched food poisoning (I think we did settle on it being food poisoning, fever and all, because apparently that comes along with a good dose of bad food), and today I really needed to make up for it. I spent most of the day doing random work that needed to be done, took a nap from 6-7, had some dinner, and have since been staring at this computer screen, zipping away on about a thousand different tasks. I've marked a LOT off my "To Do" list tonight. The problem is, at 3:30 when I was at a good stopping place and wanted to get some sleep, I couldn't. I'm still wide awake, thinking of all the other little things that I need to do.

So here I am, almost 5am, with more little things checked off my list, trying to figure out what else I can get done. I know that tomorrow is going to be pretty miserable now that my sleep schedule is entirely out of whack, but there's not a whole lot I can do about that. So. At least I'm (finally) being productive. Considering the fact that my July was an exhausting behemoth from which I still feel like I'm trying to recover, I feel like this has been the first time I've had some control over my life in about 2 months. I must say I'm a little relieved.

yuck

Chris and I got food poisoning* from our dinner last night and have been basically out of commission all day. Throwing up takes a lot out of a person, and it's worse because we're both sick so we can't really help each other. We had to ask a friend to bring us soup, crackers, and gatorade (which she did immediately, bless her heart)... anyways, not fun. We've been in an out of sleep all day and our whole bodies hurt and we are pretty pathetic. I hope I can get a good night's sleep tonight so that hopefully tomorrow we're feeling better for church, etc.

I know, not the most exciting post, but it's what my day has been, nonetheless.

*(Aug 27 Update) Turns out it may have been a virus and not food poisoning, because we've been sick a couple days now with fevers and whatnot. Definitely not fun.

Why Organic?

God's really put the idea of fair trade it on my heart a lot recently... I know I've blogged about it a couple times in the past, but right now I'm praying about what more I can do locally to spread awareness, specifically within our church and/or local churches in general, to let people know how their dollars can make a real difference in human lives. If you would pray for me in that respect, it would mean a lot.

So today I was looking at the website for a Fair Trade organization that my pastor told me about (he just bought coffee from them for the church the other day) and I ran into something that just amazed me.

This farmer was talking about why he only grows organic coffee.

"There are two main reasons that I now run a completely organic farm. The first has to do with my Dad. I grew up on a coffee farm. My father was a farm hand on a large farm and he used to spray the herbicides. The owners made him wear the tank on his back when it was filled with harmful chemicals. One day they spilled the chemical liquid all over my father’s back. Fifteen days later his skin completely peeled off and he became so sick he could never go back to work again. He has recovered some, but at the age of 65 he still can’t walk properly as a result of the accident.

Fourteen years ago when my son Luis Gonzalo was one year old, I sprayed herbicide on some of my crops. My young son had a cut on the bottom of his foot and he walked barefoot onto the place where I had just sprayed. He started to turn purple. We rushed him to the hospital and he went into a coma for three months. He was sick for seven years and is still somewhat affected by the incident. After that event, I was convinced that I would only grow crops organically."

I've started to be able to pinpoint that a lot of my health problems are related to pesticides, growth hormones, and preservatives in a lot of the food I eat. When I started cutting those things out of my diet by only buying organic and preservative-free foods, I felt a lot better. So I know that it makes a difference. But these stories just floored me. How can farmers even think about putting these things on our food? Why does the FDA approve of this stuff that can hurt us? (but really, don't get me started on the FDA and whether or not they are concerned about our health) ... I really just don't understand. Really, when it comes down to it, you're asking people "If I give you money, will you feed poison to all these people?" and a lot of people say Yes. They say "If I don't have to see them or think about the effects, and if it means I have a more comfortable life, the sure." And that's where we get the majority of our wealthy. And that just breaks my heart to think about.

I'll probably ramble more about this kind of topic as I learn more about it.

Update

Oye. I feel more than a little exhausted. This past weekend Chris, Paul, and I drove up to West Virginia to go to Tiffany's wedding. We had a good time... the wedding was beautiful. Tiffany did a spectacular job of planning a wedding on a shoestring budget, and had everything under control. She even personally stamped about a million napkins so they'd have personalized napkins. They were super-cool. And I finally got to meet her friends Spike and Samantha, both of whom I'd heard about here and there for the past 8 years, but neither of whom I'd ever met, since one lives in Pennsylvania and the other in Portland. So that was cool. But still... driving 20 hours round-trip within a 40 hour timespan is a little tiring. Just a little.

Now I'm back to normal life, and working on a bunch of freelance projects along with my jobs, and of course, maintaining stuff for the movie. There's still alot we have to do with that this month. I predict very little sleep for this girl in the month of August... hopefully September will fare a little better. And if not September, maybe October will prove restful. I know I'm looking forward to NOT going out of town for the whole month of August.

Anyways, if you're one of the large number of people who haven't really heard from me in a coon's age* then I must apologize and give you the following explanation - I'm exhausted, and I still don't have daytime cellphone minutes until August 3rd. And I haven't made nighttime phonecalls because... well... I'm exhausted. Plus my past two weeks have been spent either out of town or with company before going out of town or recovering from being out of town. Do we see a pattern here?

* (can you tell I've been to see my grandma lately? I mean really... "a coon's age?" who says that?)