Twenty- five Seven

Sleeping Beautifully

December 7, 2012
A recent acquaintance with Transient Ischemia brought home to me the importance of good sleep. Lame as it may sound, the key to good health ( apart from many others) is a good sleep. Yes, Sleeping Beauty got it right when she woke up rested after years’ of good sleep!

The connection is quite simple – if you don’t get a good night’s rest, you are tired the next day and if you are tired the next day, you don’t function properly which means you do everything wrong right from eating to exercising which means gradual weight gain and its attendant problems. Of course you can’t blame everything on sleep – you also need to maintain a healthy lifestyle and of course have good genes. But if you can do something about getting good sleep, you should make sure you do it quick.

The first thing you would need for a good sleep is a good bed which in actual fact means a good mattress. Having grown up in an era where a mattress was a mattress, I didn’t give much thought to what made a good mattress good till I went to the US of A and found out that you actually needed to know all about sleep and mattresses to make the right choice. Little did I realise that a few years later, I would be doing a similar exercise in amchi Mumbai – searching for the right mattress.

I combined my search with a walk and went to Foam Home where I found myself confronted with the same question I had heard in the US : what kind of mattress do you want? Since I couldn’t understand the technicalities, I just slept on each of the mattresses and found the one that best suited my needs and my budgets. There are, its seems, all kinds of mattresses starting from the very basic HDPE to the most complicated top-of-the pops which had latex combined with Orthogel. Incidentally Orthogel itself came in three variations – Visco Gel whch only relieves pressure points, Latex Gel which is constructed with 5 different zones and Ergo Gel which is made of 100% pure polyurethane foam and a 3 zone high load bearing layer at the base.

Obviously these don’t come cheap but if you consider the amount of money you would spend at the hospital or at the Physiotherapist, it would be definitely worth it! Because , to use the L’Oreal tagline

” YOU’RE WORTH IT!
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A stitch in time saves your mind

December 6, 2012

Photo showing the bobbin on a Singer sewing machine. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In my quest for calming my troubled soul, I try and find different activities to help me go forward with my life. Some activities are really soothing – yoga, long walks, meditation, yakking with friends, watching movies, and trying new recipes. Today I re-discovered an old craft and found out how therapeutic sewing really is.

Perhaps it is something to do with my childhood memory of my mother sewing away on her trusty electric Singer. I remember coming home every day from school, for a whole year, to find a new dress!My mother was so excited with her new machine that she couldn’t stop using it! Though I didn’t particularly love needle work at school, I loved sewing and would stitch up wardrobes for my dolls with the little scraps from my mother’s sewing. And when I grew up and had children of my own, I spent hours making clothes for them. Alas! a time came when the girls were embarrassed by their home sewn clothes and wanted more trendy, branded clothes. So I packed up my sewing machine and pulled it out only for the odd job of darning or fixing a seam that came undone.

Two weeks ago when I was looking around for clothes for Anna Shetty I realised that I could easily run her up some tops rather than beg of the tailor who happily pushes my job in the corner when another”more urgent” one comes his way ; so I went to the market and picked up some block printed cotton fabric in lavender and purple with the intention of making a peasant top. Today I resurrected my sewing book and made a paper pattern, cut out the fabric and began to stitch. It wasn’t easy because the machine was as rusty as my skills. I struggled a fair bit with the tension, looked for the instruction manual which I couldn’t find and almost gave up in frustration. But, I kept my cool and managed to stitch up the garment for Anna Shetty to try out. I plan on finishing it tomorrow.

I am glad I persisted because the familiar rumble of the sewing machine and the even stitches in straight lines helped me get back a sense of calm. Thank you, Anna Shetty for expressing a desire to wear something home made once again!
Does God really know what’s best?

December 6, 2012

Whenever I feel my faith flagging,God sends a sign to show He cares – the most recent one being on the 13th of November. Then again yesterday He sent a small reminder : Anna Shetty called home frantically to tell us that an errant taxi driver had bumped off her bumper. Now she was returning home from a night call and was quite harried so even though Jacob’s Circle is one of those chaotic junctions where 7 arterial roads radiate from, always choc-a-bloc full with all kinds of traffic – vehicular and otherwise – and the bumper was hanging by a rusty nail, this was one incident we could have all done without.

Mr. Cool, our driver, quietly took the car to the neighbourhood mechanic and got the problem attended to. While the bumper turned out to be a minor job, what actually took the better part of our budget was the clutch plate which it seems was ready to be replaced. So it was just providential that the car needed to go to a mechanic or else Anna Shetty would have been in a bigger soup with a car that refused to start in the middle of the night on a crowded road!!!

Show me the Good !

But Lord, I want to ask you where is the good for me? – what am I going to get out of four years of living in anguish? Four years of sleepless nights? Four years of slowly watching my health go to hell? Four years of watching the other members in my house slowly watch me go crazy? Four years of people deceit, lying , plotting and conniving? Where is the good in having my family slowly disintegrating?

Dear God please help me to find what is good in this for because I am blind and just cannot see.