Autistic Widower

A simple method I use to combat my overactive mind Photo taken by the author. At night time, my mind is often flitting from one thought to another, and repeatedly going over every problem it can imagine. Now that I think about it, the same thing happens during the daytime as well! When I’m in bed at night, with all that going on in my mind, it can be hard for me to get to sleep. And if I happen to wake up during the night, it’s often hard for me to get back to sleep again. In this short post, I describe my current technique for getting to sleep. It’s very simple. And like many of my ideas, it’s a bit unusual. I wasn’t even sure if I should share it, because it probably sounds a bit silly to most people. But it seems to help me, so here goes. * * * * * At various points over the years, I’ve enjoyed watching The Joy of Painting by the late Bob Ross. I never knew about the show when it was first aired, but I used to watch it with my late wife, maybe ten or twenty years ago. And over the l...

Usually, I’m the one who complains about loud noise — but not this time Photo taken by the author. A few days ago, I found myself in an unusual situation. I’d gone to town with my fiancée, to sell an old laptop computer to a shop. When they said they needed two hours to test it, we decided to have lunch in town. We found a nearby pub, which seemed fairly quiet. (Quiet might not be the best word; let’s just say there were not many other people in there.) At a nearby table, there were four women, probably around 30 years old. I’ve never heard such loud voices in my whole life! I didn’t know humans could produce such high sound levels. Usually, it’s me who complains about noise. But this time, my neurotypical fiancée was the one who found it unbearable. There were occasions when she flinched, after one of the women laughed. I certainly found it irritating and distracting, but at the same time, it was something I could tolerate. It did make me wonder though: why wasn’t I particularly bothe...

Off and on, I’ve been doing it for years without realising In recent years, I’ve started trying to observe my own behaviour, in an attempt to understand myself better. During autistic and ADHD burnout, I’ve realised that I often do a certain thing. It’s a thing I’ve been doing for decades, long before knowing about autism and ADHD. So What Is It? I spend time alone, refreshing my memory about technical subjects. It could involve books, magazines, or TV shows. Some of my old electronics books and an electronics magazine. Photo taken by the author. During the last week, I’ve watched several old computer shows that the BBC produced in the 1980s: The Computer Programme, Making the Most of the Micro, and Micro Live. I used to love those programmes when I was growing up. From about the age of 8, I’ve often re-read books and magazines about electronics. (Two of my favourite authors were F G Rayer and R A Penfold.) In each case, there’s something comforting and relaxing about sinking into anot...

The feeling of getting nowhere, when faced with multiple tasks I feel quite drained this evening, even though I don’t feel like I’ve done much today. It’s not my usual sort of post, but here’s a snapshot of my day. It includes erasing an SSD, supermarket shopping, electronics, and feeling obliged to eat a pizza with too much cheese on it. Preparing to Sell the Laptop My son wants to sell an old laptop, so I took on the job of securely erasing (sanitising) the SSD. Everything imaginable got in my way. First I made a disk image, clone and bootable USB flash drive using Macrium Reflect. But the clone would not boot from a USB hard drive, and gave a blue screen saying something like ‘Inaccessible Boot Drive’, despite being 90% of the way through starting up. So I decided to remove the SSD and put it in a USB caddy. But Micron’s Storage Executive software couldn’t work over a USB interface. So I tried a SATA caddy which connected via eSata. That wouldn’t work either, so I connected the SSD ...