sleep is my favoritest thing

It finally occurred to me that if what I'm dealing with is the aftermath of a compressed nerve* then I actually do have drugs that help with that pain. And I took a ton of gabapentin, and indeed slept really well. Woke up at quarter past four, decided I needed more sleep (which would usually mean I would wake up in another half and hour) and next opened my eyes at six-thirty.

The dream involving various friends I was doing taiji with (jinasphinx, I'm pretty sure you were one), a houseboat but not the housebarge I used to live in, and a bunch of characters from the Harry Potter universe was particularly awesome. (Hey, when my brain is bored of being asleep, but my body needs it, it does do entertaining things). The bit where I was being interrogated about where a bunch of the Harry Potter kids had gone, which I knew (or at least knew how they hid) but might well not have known, where I got way into my role and was all indignant and hysterical and then in tears was especially fun. (In real life I tend to avoid lying like the plague, but at least in the dream it was weirdly exhilarating. It might have been that I was in fact kind of stressed, but was happy to channel that stress into something useful, and in that case being all hysterical and upset was pretty useful.)

* I'm hoping the mechanical bit has been cleared up, and the rest of it is just residual swelling and it will all calm down given a chance. So... drugs. And being a bit more stoned than I like, but then I think cutting back as much as I had on the gabapentin wasn't such a great idea. Moderate doses, used with care, have a place.

Notes on sprouted grain bread

I've played with a lot of different degrees of sproutedness, and come back to grinding the grain when there are about three rootlets, and it looks a little like a bug. More than that, and you start to degrade the crumb - I'm suspecting you start losing gluten, but I haven't work out entirely if that's the case. Less than that and the flavor isn't as well developed.

For some time I wondered why the bread was so much more sour than my old daily bread. I'm increasingly convinced that it's because of bacteria that settle on the sprouting grain. Notably, if I rinse the grain well right before I wash it, I get very flavorful but less sour bread (if I go for a faster processing and rinse the grain it is less sour and less flavorful). I'm awfully pleased with this. I'm pretty sure K prefers the bread more sour, though he seems to like the latest. I'll have to decide if I want to switch off, compromise, or just let him deal.

The sprouting generally seems to increase the readily available carbohydrates (I think that some of the starches are broken down into sugars) making the yeast more active. This changes the timing of everything, and also means that I cook the bread on a lower temperature - I think the sugars caramelize otherwise.