Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

First Lego League

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Both kids are doing First Lego League this year. Of course, they are on different teams (sigh) and going to different championship rounds (each round being a full-day commitment so MEGA-sigh). Our local organization is the Northern California Lego League; I’m sure you can find yours on the general FLL site.

It’s a really cool program. FLL was created to introduce kids to how fun and interesting science and technology can be through the gateway drug of Lego. Teams have an adult coordinator and sometimes a teenager helping out, but the kids have to do all the programming, all the project design, etc. There are three parts to the competition:

  1. The robot game: What catches everybody’s eye with this tournament. The kids learn how to program a Lego robot to run around a game board and do various tasks, all within two minutes thirty seconds.
  2. The project: The kids do research on the theme of that year’s FLL Competition and then present their findings to a panel of judges, whether through a skit or some other way of presenting it. All of the team members need to participate in this section, so it can’t just be one or two kids who enjoy talking.
  3. The FLL Core Values: the driving force behind FLL is not just “science and tech are great” but “What’s this all about, anyhow?” The kids have to learn the core values and be able to discuss them intelligently with judges.

Every year there’s a real-world theme to the whole competition: this year’s is called “Food Factor” and it’s about food safety and contamination. Sophia’s team did a field trip to a sushi restaurant, to the middle school’s cafeteria, and to a local butcher’s shop to learn about food handling practices and concerns. Both kids’s teams came up with pretty cool real-world products (Simon’s team’s product is so cool I’m trying to talk the other families into doing a Kickstarter for it, but so far no takers).

Because the kids have to figure out how to program the robots and have to design the project and then present everything to judges, it’s really clear right away which kids have done the work and which had the adults doing the work for them. It does no good for adults to do the work (something I wish some parents at the kids’s schools would learn, SIGH), and one thing you learn right away is that these kids can do it. They might not do it well. They might not do it professionally. But man, some of these kids are amazing. (One kid on Sophia’s team was so into getting his robot to do its run correctly he worked in the basement of the team leader’s house for 4 hours on his own one night.) And if they’re not good at one thing (programming) they might be good at another (video editing).

This program is getting so popular several schools around us have FLL classes, with a teacher and all of last year’s Lego tools and lots of experience. These kids are well-taught and have great resources and are kicking our kids’s asses in the competitions. Both Simon and Sophia’s teams advanced in the first round, back in November, but I’m expecting both to get smoked in this coming round. (This isn’t just me; the other parents I’ve talked to feel the same way.) It’s like pickup teams facing the Yankees; of course the pickup teams have a chance.

If your kids are at all interested in science, technology, computers, robots, or Lego, and they’re between the ages of 9 and 14 (US/Canada/Mexico; 9 and 16 elsewhere, I guess), check it out. It will help you a lot if you can get people who’ve done it before involved, because for a newbie parent like me much of what was going on was baffling.

Sleep on it

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I’ve always had trouble sleeping. When I was in high school I’d lay awake listening to KSFO, when it had a Comedy Hour and wasn’t Fascist talk radio 24/7. The best sleep I ever had was when I lived next to some railroad tracks — after a week of not sleeping at all, I started sleeping like a rock. When I lived in Studio City I told Darin I couldn’t sleep, and on the weekends when he came to visit he’d hear the shouting and ruckus going on and he’d say, “I think I know why you can’t sleep.” Even after 20 years I have trouble falling asleep if Darin isn’t with me.

Being able to fall asleep isn’t even the worst part of sleep, for me. Because eventually I always pass out. No, the problem with me is that I don’t stay asleep. I often wake up two or three times a night to use the bathroom. For a while I was fully awake at 3:33 in the morning — why that time? Was it significant? Was there something noise happening in the house that woke me up at 3:33? (Seriously, I even checked our watering system to see if it was coming on then.)

I worked on the problem with needing to pee: I stopped drinking anything after dinner. No comforting cup of Good Earth tea. As little water as I could stand. I noticed I slept poorly on nights after I had chocolate ice cream, so no chocolate ice cream after 6pm (which generally means…no chocolate ice cream).

Still kept waking up.

I started taking melatonin, which was popular for a while as the sleep aid that helped reset your internal clock. Except I noticed that it gave me a hangover. I’d fall asleep right away, with almost 99% certainty, and I’d sleep at least 6 hours straight, but in the morning I’d wake up still tired, my head pounding, not feeling as though I’d been asleep at all. I went from a 5mg dose to a 1mg dose. 1mg a)did put me to sleep and b)gave me a hangover.

I stopped using it. You’re not supposed to use it for very long anyhow — just enough to set your Circadian rhythms.

When you can’t sleep you’ll try everything.

On some web page I read about or maybe just on the shelf next to the melatonin I saw this product called GABA Calm. A sublingual tablet that would help you fall asleep.

And it worked. On nights when I couldn’t fall asleep, I would use one GABA Calm and with probably 85% accuracy I would be asleep within minutes. I would stay asleep for at least 6 hours straight. When I woke up in the morning, I could remember my dreams and my head felt fine.

Of course, the Wikipedia page about GABA (the main ingredient) says that the claims that GABA enhances calmness are probably false, because there’s no evidence that GABA crosses the blood-brain barrier. Well, okay, maybe these are extraordinarily effective placebos.

Who cares? I was sleeping six hours without interruption. Trust me, that was huge.

When I was taking antidepressants (having since stopped, because of a regular exercise program — don’t try this at home, talk to your doctor first), one that he wanted to try was called gabapentin, because it’s often prescribed off-label for anxiety disorders. Apparently it gets prescribed for a whole bunch of stuff:

Gabapentin is used primarily for the treatment of seizures, neuropathic pain, and hot flashes. There are, however, concerns regarding the quality of the research on its use to treat migraines, bipolar disorders, and pain.

Well, I don’t have any menopausal symptoms yet, so I don’t know if it helps with that, personally. I never noticed gabapentin having an effect on my mood (exercise worked much more regularly for me), but WOW did it knock me out. I had a crazy amount of dreams every night, extraordinarily vivid, and I woke up feeling almost refreshed. Which was awesome!

Then taking two pills at night started leaving me a little groggy, so I moved down to one pill.

Which now leaves me groggy and feeling slightly hungover in the morning…but I do sleep 8 straight hours if I take it. If I don’t take it…chances are I won’t sleep any more than 2-3 hours straight.

I refill my prescription for gabapentin whenever I run low, but I don’t take it every night any more. If I’m still awake at 1am, I take one.

I’ve gotten hardcore on anything that might be keeping me awake: I stopped drinking anything caffeinated after 12noon (since adjusted to 3pm, which seems to be my upper boundary for effects). I exercise frequently, but not even running a marathon is a sure thing for knocking me out, so who knows. I read boring books until I feel my eyelids start to droop.

I have considered going to the Stanford sleep clinic to see if there’s something else going on.

Because I’m not living next to train tracks again, no matter how poorly I sleep.

The universe’s testing service

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If there’s a psychological term for this phenomenon, I’d love to know what it is. Everyone knows what I’m talking about when I mention it, like it’s some great metaphysical truism. I can’t come up with the proper cliche for “When you want to do something, obstacles jump into your way to test your commitment” but I know there is one. It’s not quite When it rains, it pours, because that’s just about getting more of the same (usually bad). There’s a damn cliche for everything — help me out here, people.

This week I decided to get serious about large chunks of time for my writing. I have several projects I want to finish, I have new ones I want to start. I have a list, and I am honestly interested in doing everything on the list. It is not a crazy amount of work, although it demands dedication and performance and a lack of wasting time on the Internet. I am not aimless. I am very focused.

Of course suddenly there are several thousand non-writing things that must be handled. That’s not an exaggeration: yes, they must be done and generally I am the one to do them because I am the one with a day that is easy to arrange. Simon needed to see an eye doctor ASAP. I had to drop off some stuff for the school play (which meant going to the market, then swinging by school, getting everything in there…). More Webelos stuff got scheduled we hadn’t been expecting (or should have been expecting and simply didn’t). The First Lego League Championship had been scheduled for the 14th and got unexpectedly rescheduled, so the kids’ Lego teams had to reschedule meetings. And so on.

I asked on Twitter/Facebook, “This week I’m serious about making time for my writing. The universe responds with a million appts for me to take care. What’s that about?” And one of my cohorts from USC responded, “Confirmation of commitment..are you sure that’s what you want to do.” And that’s an explanation I’ve heard from a couple of people. Like it’s an event that everyone’s experienced and is probably reproducible in a lab: You’ve mentally committed to work on your own stuff…so the universe steps up with a series of tests to make sure that you really mean what you say. Not so much mental resistance as the physical, external, in-your-face kind.

Only…I can’t really envision the Universe saying, “Hmmm…yeah, that chick over there. Too many New Year’s resolutions. I don’t buy her commitment. Throw some obstacles in her way, okay?” And the Universe’s team of elves get cracking on the problem. Actually, now that I’ve phrased it that way I totally envision the Universe and some elves, but I’m not sure it helps me understand what’s going on here to personify it this way.

This has not stopped me from phrasing my response politely as, “I will of course do all of these tasks that absolutely need to be done, and then I will get back to what I was doing before, and you will give me more time, Universe, ‘kay? Thanks.”