No caffeine after 2

Take magnesium glycinate and threonate and hour or so before bed (threonate helps me sleep but it can cause vivid dreams)

Make sure you’re comfortable in the bed both in terms of bed firmness/softness and temperature

Use a fan to regulate temperature and create white noise

Create a regular bedtime ritual (brush, floss, skincare, etc) and stick to it

Chamomile tea can help relax

I’ve also found drinking some cool/cold water right before attempting to sleep can help, because your body temperature drops as you go to sleep. I’m also a hot sleeper, so that also helps to cool down my core.

Make a regular sleep schedule and stick to it as much as possible

Write down any persistent thoughts, journal emotions, or create a to-do list from whatever might be running through your mind. Getting that out of my head and onto paper helps to alleviate any anxiety and can help stop my brain from planning and running amok while I’m lying there.

I turn off all the lights and only use some color-changing LED lights an hour or so before bed. White lights are too bright and can keep me from sleeping. Red is darker, yet still bright enough to see where I’m walking. Red lights are also best for night vision, if you go stargazing, make sure you have red flashlights, because white light will destroy your night vision for 20 minutes or so.

I also use a screen dimming app on my phone to bring the brightness down lower than the brightness setting will allow. On Apple devices, this is a regular setting in accessibility called “Reduce White Point”. Android still hasn’t figured out how to mimic that well and the best app I’ve found is Screen Dimmer Plus. It basically puts a Grey layer over whatever images show up on your phone and will mess with screenshots taken and it doesn’t change anything with the top 1/4" of the screen. The Reduce White Point setting on ios doesn’t mess with screenshots and changes the brightness for the whole screen. It’s one of the big disappointments I’ve had with android.

Get Blackout curtains to block light from the windows

Don’t exercise too close to bed. I also can’t take showers or baths too close to bed because they will disrupt my sleep.

Slow breathing and closing your eyes will lying in bed can help if you’re restless. I’ve also found that if I’m having a particularly hard time falling asleep that getting out of bed and reading a book or fiction story before returning to bed can help.

Choose something light and calming to watch as the last thing before you turn off your TV. Nature documentaries like Planet Earth or a light comedy can help you unwind and be a little more calm than watching an action, horror, or drama movie/TV show.

Another thing I’ve read about if you’re restless is to work your way uo your body squeezing your muscles for a few seconds. So start with your feet and flex them a couple times for a couple seconds, then go uo to your calves, all the way up to your eyes. The flex and release is supposed to help release any muscles that are still clenching from the day.

Spending time in nature during the day is supposed to help calm the mind and body, so finding 20-30 minutes to walk around a park could be helpful.

Don’t stress out about not falling asleep. Lying there with your eyes closed with relaxing breaths is supposed to be restful for the body

Potassium might help you relax and I think it’s also supposed to help with blood pressure if you’ve been consuming too much sodium. Not 100% sure on that, but I figure getting blood pressure under control can help you get better quality sleep.

I think the pandemic will definitely have an effect. If I recall correctly, Fox News changed gears and started promoting the vaccine after realizing that their base was dying at a faster rate than Democrats.

It could have been a co tributing factor to Georgia voting for Biden in 2020 and could be a reason why Biden was closer to winning TX than Hillary was.

Florida is hard to say, because a lot of retirees move there. So while the Republicans there may have been hit harder during covid, those may have been replaced with more Republicans moving in to retire in the sun.

I was hoping you’d be able to find it.

Maybe you can contact your county registrar and see what happened. The deadline for voter registration for the presidential election was October 7. Maybe there’s something that can be done.

That doesn’t look like the site specifically for TX. Not sure if there might be something that could cause another site to report an error.

Double check at

www.votetexas.gov

You’ll need to enter your TDL (Texas Driver’s License Number) and date of birth after clicking the “Am I Registered?” button

Kind if reminds me of the scene in The Truman Show when they talk about the cereal to the hidden camera.

I wish it was that way. I’ve seen a 20 year old get brass instruments mixed up. Many reference squidward when talking about clarinet, oboe, English horn, and bass clarinet. Unfortunately it isn’t just musician vs a 5 year old.

It’s only fair for the pets to eat us as well.

Yeah, it’s just like growing up. I remember as a kid hoping the weather would finally cool down by Halloween so we wouldn’t sweat through our costumes. In fact there were a couple years that we changed which costume we were going to buy because it would have been too hot to wear.

Don’t forget, insurance covers 50% before the deductible is met, not after. When a policy has that verbiage, usually there’s a footnote that states how those claims are handled in the future. From what I’ve seen, that could mean that insurance will cover 100% of said procedure after the deductible is met or it could mean a co-insurance of 30%.

After the deductible is met, OP won’t necessarily pay 50%. The percentage of the bill that OP and/or insurance will pay will be on a footnote at the bottom of the blue plan overview page (at least it’s blue when looking at plans from the ACA marketplace).

If you’ve met your deductible, you may not owe for the upcoming procedure.

However, you’d need to look at your policy or call the insurance company to see if the procedure counts towards your deductible. Normally the plan specifies that its 50% before the deductible and by an asterisk or buried somewhere in your plan’s terms, it may say that it’ll be 100% covered after tour deductible is met.

Is your deductible and out-of-pocket max the same? If you’ve met both, you may not even owe a copay. If you still haven’t met the out-of-pocket max, you will still owe co-pays.

Your plan documents or the company will be able to give better answers, as companies and plans can be very different in how they cover things.

Is there a particular VPN router that you suggest?

Also, is there a subscription fee or something for the VPN usage?

Thank you so much for the info!

Is there a way to put a VPN on the router, so that all devices are covered?

I found that while popping popcorn, the finished kernel (mushroom or butterfly shaped) depends on popping conditions. I only use Redenbacher and if the heat is too high, you get the mushroom shape and the kernels are dense and if you set the heat a little lower you get fluffier butterfly kernels.

Is the popped kernel shape really supposed to be different based on what kind of popcorn you buy?

It’s probably because they can remember how convenient and cheaper it was to see any movie or show that could be streamed. Streaming was supposed to disrupt TV by eliminating ads and allowing you to choose whatever you want to watch. Nowadays, in order to get the same amount of choices, you need to spend about as much as you did for a TV subscription and now many platforms have ads.

I think it’s more a frustration at what we lost than anything else.

It’s largely the same system. You can play as the Greeks, Norse, or Egyptians. Each civilization has the choice of 3 major gods (is Zeus, Hades, or Poseidon) that choice is kinda like choosing your civilization in AoE. Instead of going feudal age to castle age, you choose a different minor god to worship. Each god gives you a different god power and mythological unit (Cyclops, trolls, anubites, etc). The final civilization upgrade allows you to build a building that unleashes a titan on the map.

There is a new currency called favor that is used to research some improvements unlocked by worshiping specific gods and to train mythological units.

The types of games are largely the same as AoE, with different maps. The campaigns are a lot of fun. It’s a great game, especially if you like mythology. The stories are original and not based on the original myths, but you can learn some of the myths of heroes, mythical creatures, and the gods by right-clicking on them. The campaigns walk you through how to play and through the features that are different from AoE.

You can choose varying difficulty for the scenarios and can choose the difficulty of the computer players when playing a random map. This makes it about as complex as Age of Empires. However, just as with online AoE, the player vs player can have a steep learning curve if you’re matched against people that have been playing a long time.

Age of Empires and Age of Mythology play similarly, where it’s easy to cross from one to the other with many similar human units shared between the games. I think it’s definitely worth a look into! Even the remake that’s already on steam is worth it in my opinion.

In the US, it’s extremely rare to have a light switch outside if yhe room with the light. Usually there’s a lights witch and a couple sockets in the bathroom by the mirror.

This comment reminds me that one time I came across an hour and a half long ad on YouTube that turned out to be a full episode of some show and something else. It was crazy to see one that long after skipping a couple ads

If you don’t believe the official counts, than where would you go for a source?

We were only 600,000 votes away from a Biden victory in 2020 because we didn’t have enough voters. TX has pitiful voter turnout, even with 2 weeks if open polls, with polls required to be open at least 12 hours a day on the weekday.

In 2020, even with what’s called amazing turnout, with a voting age population of 21.5 million, 17 million were registered, and 11.3 million cast a vote. Then in 2022, when we had the entire legislative branch, almost all of the executive branch, and a good chunk of the judicial branch up for election, only 8.1 million people voted.

Even with these numbers, Biden still received more votes in TX than he did in NY! There’s potential for us to get some better representation, if we can just get more people to get to a polling station (usually open 7AM-7PM during the second week of voting).

We need more people to turnout this year, not only to keep Trump from our electoral college votes, but to kick Ted Cruz to the curb. There is a lot in the news pushing people away from the pills and making people mad at the DNC just like in 2016 and its really scary because those tactics helped keep people from casting their vote.

Turnout number source https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/70-92.shtml

Only other place I can think of off-hand is the local library for rentals. Half Price Books and thrift shops will have some for sale, but I’m not sure how much lower they may be from Amazon’s rental fee.