Having a Bad Awakening following the usual Bad Sleep, and so I am not feeling so hot right now.

Specifically, I feel distinctly out of breath. I must have been deep into the sleep apnea this time, because I woke up feeling like I had spent a few years in a dusty closet with a couple of moldy mops and a bucket of soured rinse or ten.

Even as I type this, I am experiencing bouts of intense desire to yawn, and that is always a clear sign that you are not getting enough oxygen to the brain. That is what a yawn is, basically : a special reflex used to make you take a great big breath and get that oxygen deep into your lungs.

So here I am, feeling half smothered, with blocked up sinuses (stupid hayfever, that is probably what brought this sleep apnea bullshit on) and a feeling not entirely unlike death deep down in the core of my being, trying to yawn and use deep breathing exercises to bring myself back to within at least a stone’s throw of the land of the living.

Mostly, what I want to do right now is just lay back down and try to pull myself together in a nice dark room with maybe a little music on so I can just chill out and concentrate fully on slow deep soul breaths and then maybe get myself back together a bit.

But, it is Writing Time, and that is something I never miss no matter how I feel. Managing to put a thousand words a day out is the only thing that makes my life worth living, sad as that is, and I absolutely refuse to let anything deflect that.

I am coming to a period of dissatisfaction, though, when I become increasingly discontent with the usual daily diary diarrhea and want to put together something more substantial, like an essay, or even better, a short story of some sort.

Or heck, even a poem, if it is long enough.

So hopefully this will percolate in the cast iron kettle of my brain for a while and then I will come up with something besides this useful but meaningless drivel.

I have been struggling to find a way to translate the backup I made of this blog into something readable. I wanted to just use Blogbooker, a very cool website that turns your WordPress XML backup into a nicely formatted PDF book, but it says the XML backup this blog spits out is full of XML errors and I do not know a damn thing about XML so I don’t know how to fix it.

It is a pity, too, because Blogbooker did a lovely job with the backup of the Million Word Year and I was so looking forward to having something similar for this blog to take with me should I decide to depart for Tumblr or whatnot.

But alas, it seems it is not to be. I might get an XML debugging program and see if I can ferret out the errors that way, hoping to more or less bluff my way through, or I might not. We will see.

Then I tried a plugin that said it would export my blog to text, which is exactly what I want, just a big text file with all the posts in it, in order, with subject lines and dates.

But no, instead, it put them in a tab delimited database type format suitable for importing into a spreadsheet program like Excel or OpenOffice Calc.

But I didn’t want a spreadsheet, I wanted a text file, or a PDF, or the like. Something readable by humans, specifically, me.

Oh well. I have the XML file and this tab delimited thing, and I can always beaver away at those until I come up with something. I managed to open the XML thing in OpenOffice Writer (the word processing component of it) in such a way that it is more or less readable if you ignore a bunch of XML garbage in between the entries, and so if I wanted to go through that and extra the Good Stuff, it would not be too onerous a task.

The main point is, I will lose no writing if I decide to jump ship and go blog on Tumblr or Blogger or something like that. It will all be there on my hard drive, waiting for me to sift through it all and pan out the gold from the river silt of my ramblings.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, Therapy Day, the first in two weeks. Last week my therapist was on vacation to spend time with his grandchildren, and let me tell you, I have not enjoyed the extended time between visits. I really missed it when I did not have therapy to go to last week, and I hope it is a long time before he has to take another Tuesday off.

I have come, it seems, to rely on that once a week chance to really express my emotions to someone who can help me birth those deep down dark demons that weight me down. It is not always a pleasant experience, and sometimes he drives me nuts with the whole “I think you know the answer… ” routine that therapists seem to love.

But in the long term, it does me a lot of good, like writing a thousand of these soul searching diary entries all at once in terms of therapeutic release, and I look forward to tomorrow’s session.

Afterward, I will cash that GST check, and hopefully do that lab work I keep putting off. It all depends on if I can stand to (and remember to) go ten hours without eating.

That is always the hard part, the fasting. It is unpleasant, to say the least. Getting blood drawn and providing a urine sample, those are not fun but they are no big deal.

But going ten hours with no food, only water… that sucks.

Wish me luck with that.