My wife is from Russia and she is used to buying food at government subsidized prices, so has been trained since a child to throw over 65% of her food away.

This for some reason really bothers me, and my conservative approach to things, I have just always felt you should not waste stuff just because you can, and this goes for food too.  I always take what I can eat and then eat what I take. It seems pretty simple to me.

But my wife looks at it differently, if she wants one banana then she will usually take 3, sometimes 4.  I have seen her want to warm up a cup of milk, so she will pour 2 cups into the pan, heat it then use half and throw the other half out.

After seeing so much food being throw out I just couldn’t take it any longer and I bought a blender.  I forgot to mention when she is at the store and wants a banana she will buy 8 or 12 of them.  If they get any brown spots on them, which sometimes happens before any of them are eaten, then she buys 8 or 12 new banana and throws the old ones out.

Armed with my new blender I now take the old bananas and blend them with other fruit and make a fruit drink for my lunch.  Not only is it a very healthy meal, it’s also free, since all the food I am eating would be going straight into the trash.

I can usually eat 2 bananas and some other fruit everyday this way, if the bananas start backing up and my 2 a day can’t keep up with the supply of unwanted food, then just as they turn sold black I peel them and put them in the freezer. That way they will keep for months, and eventually I will get caught up.

It is pretty surprising how old and rotten a banana can get and still taste fine when you blend it with some other stuff. You do want to get them before they turn mostly liquid, this has happened a few times, and then it’s really too late to eat them.  So just make sure to get them in the freezer before they hit that state.

Strawberries

Strawberries are amazing, because they have a pretty strong taste that can really over power a lot of things.  One is sour milk, we had a half gallon of milk that went sour and it was pretty sour too, it had made it to the point where there were lumps in it, and it really smelled bad.

I know sour milk is not harmful to drink, it just tastes bad, so I put in my old bananas the sour lumpy milk and some strawberries, and I decided I was going to drink it no matter what it tasted like.  To my surprise I found out that a dozen strawberries will completely remove the bad taste of sour milk. It really did not taste sour at all, I had trouble telling the difference between fresh milk and the sour lumpy milk I used.

So now I don’t throw away old milk either, I just buy some strawberries and drink it the next day.

Apples

Apples are interesting because they have almost no taste when you blend them, they don’t help anything, and they don’t hurt anything, if you can get them on sale by the bag they are pretty cheap a lot of the time and great when you don’t have enough other fruit to use but you don’t want anything that will change the taste of what you already have.

If you put in small amounts you can get rid of almost any fruit or vegetable that is getting old, I have used avocado, peaches, pears, and tomatoes to name a few.  The trick is you want to start with something you like the taste of then you can throw in a third of an avocado and you won’t really notice it at all.

Nuts

Nuts are good and they are good for you, so they work really well.  You want to run the blender a little longer to make sure you only end up with really small pieces that are easy to drink.

I have been taking melatonin for several years, at times there is no doubt it helps me sleep better.  But there is just as many times where it probably has no effect.

One of the things that kind of bugs me when I am trying to find information on something is when I run into a site like the Mayo Clinic, and they say something like

It’s thought that taking melatonin for longer than two months may be harmful, and the best dose of melatonin isn’t certain.

I guess that’s slightly better than saying nothing, but I am not sure?

There is a lot of talk about taking melatonin and it not being good for you, so I have decided to stop taking it.

The Mayo Clinic also says that there is little evidence that melatonin will help you fall asleep or stay asleep,  then they turn around and say that you shouldn’t operate heavy equipment if because you could fall asleep.

So that really clears things up for me…

I would say only about once a week or maybe a little less often does melatonin really knock me out where I am so groggy I can’t wake up., but sometimes it will definitely give me this feeling, so I would dispute their claim that it does not help you sleep.  It definitely does not make me feel this way every night, and it seems that I get different results from the different brands.  Although, it’s hard to tell because it’s pretty hit or miss anyway.

The benefits from taking it are not so great that it would be worth risking it if the Mayo Clinic is right and it turns out that is really is “harmful” after all, so I am going to stop taking it every night.

I have had trouble sleep for most of my adult life.  Sometimes I will go a few months and not have too much trouble, but sooner or later something always seems to start interfering.

Of course I always try to do the basics:

• Wake up at the same time  - Even on weekends.
• Go to sleep at the same time
• Keep your bedroom dark
• Watch how much caffeine you drink before going to sleep
• Create a bedtime ritual – and don’t break it
• Avoid loud alarm clocks
• Control the room temperature -  don’t let it get too hot

So I have done all these and I still have trouble sleeping.

The Clock

This last week I have made a couple changes and I was surprised how much of a change they made.  When I sleep I keep the room completely dark, and so I can’t see my clock.  But I was used to checking the time when I would wake up at night, so I bought a clock and projects a small red image on the ceiling.  Not enough light to disturb my sleep, but easy to see when I want to know what time it is.  I thought this was helping me by keeping track of how many hours I slept, and how many more hours I had left to sleep.

I have been doing this for so long I can’t even remember when I started. But I read something about watching the time being stressful, and I have experienced that.  I will sit and watch the clock for a couple hours thinking I need to get at least a couple more hours sleep before it’s time to get up.  Well last week I got rid of my clock, and it only took me a couple days to get used to not checking the time in the middle of the night.  It was really surprising to me how much less stressful it is not knowing what time it is.  When I wake up in the middle of the night, I just wait until I go back to sleep and I have no idea how long it takes. No clock to watch and keep track of how many minutes I have been awake.

If you have a clock and you check the time your not sleeping at night, try doing without it for a week and see if it works as well for you as it has for me.

The Computer Problem

The other problem started when a friend loaned me a smart  phone, this phone has the internet on it and I can always find something on the internet that looks interesting to me:

• Email
• Current news
• New scientific studies
• My favorite tabloid websites
• Local newspaper website
• World stock markets

These are just a few of the things that interest me and I can spend hours and hours checking up on them. Now with the new internet connection on my nightstand, when I can’t sleep I reach over and jump on the internet and off I go. Originally I thought that this was a good thing because for a couple days it seemed to take my mind off things and I thought it was helping me to get back to sleep sooner than if I just laid there thinking about things.

After a couple of weeks, it became clear that I was sleeping less and less, and instead of something that would help me take my mind off things, and let me get back to sleep sooner.  It was obvious that I was now waking up just so I could use the internet, and I was starting to think of more things I could look up in the middle of the night. Now I have all the old stuff going through my mind plus all the new things I could be checking on…

• Did they catch Quadaffi?
• Did that space sattelite crash back to earth yet?
• if it did, did it kill anyone when it landed?
• Is BPA really bad for you?

I have known for a while that it was causing problems with my sleep, I just didn’t want to admit it.

But I decided when I tried my clock experiment I didn’t want to just start turning on the smart phone to check the time, so I gave it up.

These two changes made a really big difference in how many hours of sleep I get each night.