Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[Little Sherri]

I've always been curious as to if the people who started the Smeg brand have ever watched Red Dwarf... 

Thankfully, in my area of Canada at least, we only need what we call GFCI's (ground-fault circuit interrupters) on outlets that are outdoors, in bathrooms, or on the kitchen countertops where a small appliance might get dropped into a sink, for example. So our refrigerators are exempt. I've been saved by one a couple of times, at least in theory, when I've run over an extension cord with a lawnmower, or trimmed the power cord to my hedge trimmer with my hedge trimmer. 

Our voltage is lower than yours, though, at 120 for standard outlets, with 240 reserved for dryers and ovens and high-draw personal massage devices. Although they say it's the amperage that kills you, and our amperage is slightly higher, I think, than yours - 15 amps is standard everywhere but in the kitchen, where it's 20 amps. 

You guys get 240 V at 10 amps, right? That still leaves you with a useful wattage advantage over us - we can get to about 1800 watts before circuits start popping, although in practice, 1500 is where most devices are capped. You guys can get to 2400 watts, very useful for in-line heaters used during circulation in mash tuns. One of my friends discovered this when he purchased an Australian RIMS system, and then discovered that he need an electrician, and, permission to brew exclusively in his laundry room. 

I've been zapped by 240 volts before, and it's serious business, although that was a 30 amp circuit (clothes dryer), whereas 120 V just causes your arm to go numb and twitch. One can theoretically get killed by 120 V, I guess if you're, say, making toast in the bathtub and using an extension cord to bypass the GFCI. 

[~Brian~]

46 minutes ago, Little Sherri said:

I've always been curious as to if the people who started the Smeg brand have ever watched Red Dwarf... 

Thankfully, in my area of Canada at least, we only need what we call GFCI's (ground-fault circuit interrupters) on outlets that are outdoors, in bathrooms, or on the kitchen countertops where a small appliance might get dropped into a sink, for example. So our refrigerators are exempt. I've been saved by one a couple of times, at least in theory, when I've run over an extension cord with a lawnmower, or trimmed the power cord to my hedge trimmer with my hedge trimmer. 

Our voltage is lower than yours, though, at 120 for standard outlets, with 240 reserved for dryers and ovens and high-draw personal massage devices. Although they say it's the amperage that kills you, and our amperage is slightly higher, I think, than yours - 15 amps is standard everywhere but in the kitchen, where it's 20 amps. 

You guys get 240 V at 10 amps, right? That still leaves you with a useful wattage advantage over us - we can get to about 1800 watts before circuits start popping, although in practice, 1500 is where most devices are capped. You guys can get to 2400 watts, very useful for in-line heaters used during circulation in mash tuns. One of my friends discovered this when he purchased an Australian RIMS system, and then discovered that he need an electrician, and, permission to brew exclusively in his laundry room. 

I've been zapped by 240 volts before, and it's serious business, although that was a 30 amp circuit (clothes dryer), whereas 120 V just causes your arm to go numb and twitch. One can theoretically get killed by 120 V, I guess if you're, say, making toast in the bathtub and using an extension cord to bypass the GFCI. 

@Little Sherri

playing around with voltages like that can be dangerous. I've gotten shocked by 1:20 volts that is, and it can really curl your hair. It can also numb up your fingers and prolonged contact can probably cause heat and probably small burns.

This is why there is plenty of protections when you're dealing with electricity and fuses and all of these things that are added to protect you. I remember a story once which I'll always remember, and in the computer field, as I have been for over 30 years, when I heard this story I almost ended up peeing my pants! My friend owned a computer shop in my town, and he used to fix customers computers and cell software for video game systems. After the video game craze died down considerably, he decided to go completely computers.

He's dealt with everything from dead computers, to really dirty disgusting bearded computers, to idiots who are really idiots.He's also dealt with situations where if somebody doesn't have a warranty on a piece of equipment , or it is out of warranty, the company simply ask you one question if it's in warranty, and if you were still in warranty, the company would help you , well if you are not in warranty, this company would simply hang up on you and won't want to deal with you . I remember that happening a couple times and I couldn't believe it myself, but I watched as my friend made an inquiry for a customer karma and sure enough when he determined that there was no warranty coverage on this piece of equipment, the representative hung up on the customer . My friend got really mad, called back the individual that ended up providing the service, and ask directly why he was getting disconnected , being told that the product was not in warranty , he instructed the person on the support and that that is not a very good idea to have customers who you are trying to service, and then just hanging up on them and giving up on them when their warranty dies. The appropriate way is to tell them that they are out of warranty, and then try to help them try to fix their problem . Unfortunately, this company was cannon and they are nefarious and notorious for doing just that hanging up on customers apparently. It was the weirdest thing I've ever heard in my life

even sillier, there was a couple of times when I saw a situation where there was a gentleman that was talking about the fact that 120 volts only tickles your fingers, or causes a slight tingle.  The gentleman was talking about 120, which is normally what you would see on a regular outlet that is not connected to a dryer or an oven or something that is high-powered. The person was saying that 120 really doesn't hurt too bad if you get zapped by it karma but then he was saying that laptop said the same way. This was ridiculous, and I explained to him and my friend tried to explain to this gentleman that basically you're talking about a laptop. You plug all laptop into a 120 plug, and then you're not talking about plugging the other end into the laptop directly - you're talking about plugging that into a transformer, which is basically going from 120 volts AC IN, going through the transformer, which is 240 volts, which steps up the power, and then it goes into the power port of the laptop. This gentleman was trying to tell my friend who had been servicing computers for over 30 years, that you basically do not get hurt if you take a paper clip plugging in a 120 Volt power plug into a wall socket and sticking it on your tongue! This guy was crazy! You might not be shock too much, but when you add some sort of liquid to an electric circuit, it can cause further damage because you're talking about having a conductor of electricity! This gentleman said that if he took a 120 Volt plug from a computer, plugged it into a wall, unplugged it from the back of a computer and stuck 2 paper clips in, and stuck it on his tongue, that that wouldn't hurt too badly.We both agreed that it probably wouldn't be a smart idea, and it probably wouldn't hurt too badly, but that's where the silliness got even worse!

this gentleman made the bold statement that you could do that with a laptop's power supply: because it is 120 volts. That is true, but it has to go through the step down transformer because it comes out of the computer at 240 volts and goes down into the transformer, and is drawing 120 volts.  If he took the cable out of the back of the laptop, and did that with some sort of paper clip, he would end up getting a straight 240 volts directly from the socket on the end! We both told this gentleman that he was an idiot, and after this gentleman left we all got a good laugh because we knew damn well that he was crazy- I'm not sure why this guy thought for one moment that you could take a computer, running 120 volts into a wall socket which you unplug from the back of a transformer, and do that would be the same as if you took the cable off the back of a laptop and did the same thing. You can get seriously injured by this sort of stupidness, and we kept telling him how silly and stupid it was. Electricity is nothing to mess with, and this guy apparently was a daredevil and 1/2 I'm not sure why he thought it was so funny, but none of us thought it was!

That's why it's always important to be able to know what you're plugging into what, and what voltage each of the things that you're plugging in is. You have to make sure that you're not going to overload a circuit, and to make sure you have enough Breakers to be able to handle the load of your circuits. Fooling around with stupid stuff like that can cause a fire or a serious injury or death if somebody isn't doing the right things. That is why you need license electricians to do a lot of the work with electrical. That is why inspections are done, because the wrong type of wiring or the done the wrong way can cause a fire or serious injury or possibly death.

This story kinda shocked me when I first heard it, and it was many years ago, probably about 25 or more, but I still think some of the people in this world think that electricity is not too big of a deal to deal with. Sure, you can get zapped if you make a mistake, and if you're only zapped a little bit, that might be not too bad, but you don't wanna be taking chances with the differences between 120 volts and 240 volts. I don't even know what they would use in the United Kingdom, or Scotland for actual electricity, for example, but I know the plugs are different, and each one of the plugs apparently that is made for an adapter or something plugged in, has a fuse in the plug which can be replaced. I've learned that from watching videos from my mate Vince: he fixes a lot of different stuff and he does it using minimal skill, but he doesn't do anything silly, and he tries to make things work, but he always knows one thing and that is not to mess around with electricity if he's not sure what he's doing.

I've also had things that actually short circuit in front of me, or that blow a circuit, and what happens is when it happened to me either I got zapped a little bit and I got my hand underneath the plug and touching it by mistake, because my hand slipped, or when you plug something in and something is weak in the cord, I plug it in and I get a spark out of the outlet, or it blows a fuse, and man the smoke will start rolling. I've also heard that if it smells like almonds anywhere near your outlets, that you have a serious problem and you need to look at your outlet to see if anything is burning or anything is charred or burnt on the outlets or in the outlets themselves!

You like me, will not mess around with electricity! Electricity helps us do a lot of things in our daily lives and helps us maintain air conditioners, televisions, computers, medical devices, and a whole bunch of different other stuff. One thing I will not mess around with however is anything that may have anything to do with electrical wiring. If I see a wire that is somehow exposed, and I can try to fix it, the furthest I will go is to get electrical tape and then try to fix the wire by running electrical tape over the cord so that the insulation is not cut into so it doesn't show bare wire. If for some reason something is so badly damaged that I can see bare wire, I don't even attempt to fix it, I will replace it rather than to fool around with electricity, and I'm sure that spoon chicken would agree, that electricity is very dangerous if you do not know how to handle it, and you do not respect it.

Brian

'

''re that @spoonchicken

[oznl]

7 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

I've always been curious as to if the people who started the Smeg brand have ever watched Red Dwarf...

Or indeed, ever paused to consider the unfortunate etymology of the word.  I never chose those appliances, they came pre-fitted to the house I bought.  Each one of them proved awful in its own, unique way.  I could write a book.

7 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

You guys get 240 V at 10 amps, right? That still leaves you with a useful wattage advantage over us - we can get to about 1800 watts before circuits start popping, although in practice, 1500 is where most devices are capped. You guys can get to 2400 watts, very useful for in-line heaters used during circulation in mash tuns. One of my friends discovered this when he purchased an Australian RIMS system, and then discovered that he need an electrician, and, permission to brew exclusively in his laundry room.

Notionally 240v (recently downgraded by bureaucratic decree to 230v) but due to the size of our grids and more recently, a whole bunch of domestic solar (I’d be surprised if Canada doesn’t face a similar issue), the grid voltage can and does wander around a bit.  Anything between 220v and 250v is par for the course.  Normal domestic circuits are 10A but 15A or even 32A are available for high wattage devices such as ovens, larger AC and hot water services.  Back in the 1980s in my first job, we used to lose a lot of IT devices out in Western Australia (nearly 4x as large as Texas in area) with measured grid voltages sometimes reaching 260v.  The wild west has since been tamed.

I’ve tasted 240v twice: both as a kid making dumb mistakes.  One time I was very lucky to survive.  It hits hard.

6 hours ago, ~Brian~ said:

playing around with voltages like that can be dangerous. I've gotten shocked by 1:20 volts that is, and it can really curl your hair. It can also numb up your fingers and prolonged contact can probably cause heat and probably small burns.

It’s not the voltage (electrical pressure) passing through your body that kills you but rather the current (rate of flow).    It only takes a few thousandths of an amp in the right place for the right time to defeat your heart’s own electrical timing circuit.  Having said that, depending on the circumstances, a higher voltage can be a very good way of pushing more current through your heart so for me, anything much above about 50v starts to earn my respect.  In the right circumstances, I would say 120V is plenty lethal.

I didn't get any lecture on nocturnal sartorial elegance today so maybe I got away with that...

[Puppyz]

As an electrician,  my money is always on the problem being something that makes things really hot,  or things that make things really cold. Failing those not being the culprit,  then it falls to things with 4 legs either touching a circuit board (looking at you Mr gecko) or things that like to nibble on cable insulation (Mr rodent) 

 

[oznl]

3 hours ago, Puppyz said:

As an electrician,  my money is always on the problem being something that makes things really hot,  or things that make things really cold. Failing those not being the culprit,  then it falls to things with 4 legs either touching a circuit board (looking at you Mr gecko) or things that like to nibble on cable insulation (Mr rodent) 

 

I'd like to think it was one (well, TWO) of those random RCD moments but the last one of these was (of course) a split system that, faulting intermittently, was only diagnosed on the second visit.  Most likely a Gecko but I wasn't home to conduct a root cause analysis on the departed AC come repair time.  I'll have a look under the house tomorrow at the exposed cable runs (of which there are many) but I'm acutely aware that there are no less then 7 split systems in my house and the odds are high ?  It hasn't tripped in the last 36 hours which is something.

It must have been so much easier in the good old days where you only had to wait for something to catch fire and you'd know where the fault was...

[Puppyz]

2 minutes ago, oznl said:

I'd like to think it was one (well, TWO) of those random RCD moments but the last one of these was (of course) a split system that, faulting intermittently, was only diagnosed on the second visit.  Most likely a Gecko but I wasn't home to conduct a root cause analysis on the departed AC come repair time.  I'll have a look under the house tomorrow at the exposed cable runs (of which there are many) but I'm acutely aware that there are no less then 7 split systems in my house and the odds are high ?  It hasn't tripped in the last 36 hours which is something.

It must have been so much easier in the good old days where you only had to wait for something to catch fire and you'd know where the fault was...

It could also be a faulty RCD unit. Have had instances where they would trip intermittently for no reason. Very hard to fault find when they don't trip immediately. Can also be an accumulation of stray voltages in a few different items with the wet weather causing a breakdown in insulation properties. 

Definitely check the cable runs under the house (sounds like you are in an older QLD'er type house or the square box spec types that were common in the 70's and 80's ?) . Back in the day when I did domestic elec work in between construction projects, I had a call to a house that a fuse (yes that long ago XD ) that was blowing when it rained. Turned out Mr rodent chewed a cable where the water dripped on it. 

With 7 splits in the house, each of those really should be on its own RCD breaker unit. 

[oznl]

1 hour ago, Puppyz said:

 (sounds like you are in an older QLD'er type house or the square box spec types that were common in the 70's and 80's ?) .

With 7 splits in the house, each of those really should be on its own RCD breaker unit. 

Nah... late 80s architect designed double brick mausoleum.  A steep site, 2/3 of the house ground floor is suspended wooden floor with enough clearance below to walk around with a torch.  I retrofitted 7 splits because I have a family of wusses who melt above 22C and the vaulted ceilings and 3 levels made ducting impossible.   That same design would have made running separate power feeds an absolute nightmare although the big AC in the living area is certainly on its own.

I'll have a good look around tomorrow.  I'll call a sparky if I find anything I don't like but I know enough myself to troubleshoot.

[BabyJilly_S]

@Little Sherri props for the Red Dwarf reference  

In the UK our set up is pretty simple seemingly. In my house one fuse box, with five fuses in it for the various bits, two lights, two for sockets , 1 for a shower.  The thing is inside , so no nocturnal sojourns outside when something trips. 

All our plugs have fuses and three pins, so are properly earthed.  

And there my knowledge really peters out. I will have a go a most all bits of DIY in my house, but when it comes to electrics, its basically "nah, call someone".   

 

[Little Sherri]

5 hours ago, Adam Foster said:

Still like to hear from someone who has managed to find a partner who is more than happy and comfortable with them wearing and using nappies 24/7.

I fall into the "found a partner who puts up with it so far" category. 

[oznl]

This week I dabbled briefly in one of spousal life’s most dangerous conversational waters: my bedwetting.

Those of you following this chronicle will know that by now, I’m no longer reliably dry at night.  That’s no aspirational, hormone-fuelled fantasy interpretation of reality.  Some nights, I pee when I’m asleep now.  That's just how things are.  You can ask my sheets (if I skip the nappy).  They’ll tell you.

After more than a year’s mounting evidence that the pee fairies were visiting during the night, I’d tried to bring my beloved up to speed with these “developments”, perhaps in the hope that she’d drop some of the pressure on me to come out of nappies.  It did not go well.  After I persisted past the initial “pretending not to hear” phase, we swiftly sailed on through “tears”, “sulk”, “counter-offer” (her permission to be night diapered in exchange for giving up day diapers) mooring eventually in the port of drop-the-discussion-or-I’ll-bite-you.

I let it drop.

Another year or so down the road, the opportunity for this conversational bon motte arose again.

The spark for this was a miserable night’s sleep due to NON-bedwetting.  Last weekend a week ago I’d gone to bed in dry nappies on two consecutive nights and woken to find myself wet on two consecutive mornings with zero insight, zero fuss.  Happy day, well nights really.  I’m quite comfortable with it now and I also know that bedwetting means sleep.  Sleep is rare for me.  I value it greatly, ipso facto, I value the bedwetting.  I always seem to greet the day in a better mood when I’ve wet the bed.  I’ve no idea why.

This weekend just past however, was the polar opposite of the weekend before (insert standard rant about the capricious and highly variable nature of our decline here).  After a dry Friday night (ended by frustrated-and-wakeful-decision at around 3am to use my nappy), I’d tried again on Saturday, clambering into bed in a dry, freshly laundered Babykins cotton/terry pull-ups under clean smelling white plastic pants.

At 2:02am, I was awoken by an aching bladder to find myself in a dry, freshly laundered Babykins cotton/terry pull-up under clean smelling white plastic pants.  Seriously?  Note to brain: STOP doing this.  I do NOT need to be woken for a simple pee anymore.

There was no chance of further sleep in my current state.  I needed to pee too badly.  That’s what had woken me.  Vaguely annoyed at myself, I relaxed the appropriate muscles (mentally chastising myself for not having them relaxed by default) and waited for the wet warmth to appear at the relevant part of my anatomy.

It didn’t.

I waited some more, some more and some more again.  I’d been dry for hours, my bladder was shouting at me and it seemed that something was “stuck” down there.   I rolled over onto my back and rummaged around in my dry nappy to loosen up some space and bore down to try to force things forward.  I lay there for a while in discomfort for a few minutes longer, wondering at what point I should declare a medical emergency.  Eventually, the most anaemic dribble appeared alongside aching bladder spasms.  It was 2:06am.

Relief came agonisingly slowly.  By 2:10am, I was STILL trying to finish wetting myself.  How hard can it be?  Four minutes doesn’t sound like a long time unless you’ve spent it unsuccessfully emptying your bladder.  At every lapse in concentration, the pathetic dribble stopped but I knew that I was far from empty.

A minute or two after that, things settled down into a persistent dripping that I felt could be safely ignored and I started to drift off back to sleep, presumably still dripping.  It was precisely then that some giant fruit bats decided to have a squabble (or perhaps it was sex, it’s hard to tell with fruit bats) in the palm trees outside my window.

I must have eventually dozed off after 3am but it didn’t last.  Suddenly it was 4am and we got to do the whole thing over again: woken by a painful bladder, painful urges only to have considerable difficulty in relieving myself.  I wasn’t even that wet after the 2am episode.

By now, sleep had been thoroughly disrupted.   As the last of the nocturnal possums thundered across the iron roof overhead after a night of pooping on our rear deck, the first of Australia’s unparalleled menagerie of incredibly noisy native birds started raucously shrieking about a sunrise that would soon appear.

It had been nearly a complete write-off in terms of the night’s sleep.

It was later that Sunday morning and I sat on the couch next to my beloved, dejected and numb with fatigue, contemplating my cooling cup of coffee.

“What happened that wrecked last night?” she asked.

I told her the truth.

“My bladder woke me up to torture me every two hours and each time it did, I couldn’t get back to sleep”

“I noticed you drinking glasses of water last night” she replied.

“Yeah, that was just to try to slow the amount of red wine I’d otherwise drink.  I don’t think there was any unusual quantity of fluid drunk, just a bit less alcohol”.

That was utterly true.  I’d been getting guilty feelings about draining vats of red wine and not remembering what kinds of rubbish I’d been watching on You-Tube.  If I’m going to watch utter rubbish on You-Tube (looking at YOU “Dash-cam Australia”), I should remember it enough to own it the next morning.  Accordingly, I was alternating wine with water.  Still, whilst I was wet by morning, I wasn’t unusually wet and there was no danger of my Babykins cloth pullup leaking.  This wasn’t a “quantity of pee” thing.  It was some other ineffable thing.

“I’ve had two kids and I can make it through the night” she announced.

This is SOMETIMES true for her.  Possibly even most times, but not all the time.  However debating seemed less than chivalrous so I decided to concede this point with a small home-truth payload.

“Well I can’t.  I need to pee at LEAST 2 – 3 times every night, possibly more, I don’t know anymore.  These days it’s just that it often happens while I’m asleep and frankly, that’s a MUCH more comfortable outcome for me but last night my bladder woke me up instead and here we are”.

This was explosive stuff.  Not only the dubiously-attractive fact-cupcake that her husband now wets the bed but one resplendent in the rather confrontational frosted icing of the fact that he rather prefers wetting the bed instead of waking up.   Amazingly however, there were no pouts, tears or storming out of the room.  Instead, she then, quite sensibly, asked about my prostate.

I haven’t looked at it.  I assume it’s still there.  I’d also assumed that much of my increasing urinary dysfunction was down to my habitual nappy use but looking at the facts, I must also accept them in light of the fact that my father, at my age, had rampant enlarged prostate issues.  My GP knows my family history of prostate cancer and so I have PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) tests on high rotation.

My current discomforts are far more likely to be simply from an enlarged prostate and those discomforts are (with the possible exception of last night) largely mitigated by my disuse of my continence.

I replied accordingly:

“To be honest, I’ve got a fairly standard late-middle-aged-male issue as you’d remember my Dad had at the same vintage but in my case, the unpleasant effects of this are more or less completely masked from me by my nappies”.

She asked about the “roto-rooter” (trans-urethral resection of prostate AKA “TURP”) surgery that my father was subjected to. 

“Yes, it’s possible and I may well qualify but if my nappies can handle things, why bother?  It’s a load of gap payments, pain and time off work I don’t need and the principle complication from that surgery is incontinence anyway.” 

Accepting this, she didn’t comment further and the conversational topics moved on.

The headline however was that I was able to dispassionately talk about my nappies and bedwetting in responding to her questions.  During that dangerous conversation she remained pleasant and non-judgmental. 

Perhaps there is some glimmer of acceptance finally appearing here.

[BabyJilly_S]

It is so fickle, it would indeed be lovely if it would just get on with it when asleep.

I hope this is acceptance for you.

[oznl]

A brief postscript to my last update.

On Sunday night, exhausted by Saturday night’s more-or-less complete failure to sleep compounded by a vat of red wine, I waddled off to bed in a BetterDry + booster under my terry-lined plastic pants.  I was a bit wet as you’d expect after 4 hours wear but I fell asleep quickly.

I may have stirred during the night but I’m not sure.  I could only remember the clock radio waking me at 6am whereupon I found my nappy soaked and my bladder curiously empty.  In all probability, I’d just broken my latest bedwetting drought with the usual never-fail tactic of not trying to. 

Not having gone to bed dry I can’t 100% prove it but it’s highly unlikely that my very-wet nappy, my very-empty bladder and my complete lack of insight as to how this had come about had occurred without one or more visits from the pee fairies.

Breakfasting with my beloved before work, she asked me if I’d managed any sleep.

“Yes!” I replied with some relief.  “I’m not sure what happened between bedtime and alarm time so I’m guessing I got sleep”.

“So no more bladder problems?” she enquired politely.

“Not that I can remember. I think it all worked on automatic last night and I wasn’t woken by it”.

The news that her manly, appliance-repairing hairy provider and defender-against-spiders had wet his nappy in bed beside her in his sleep overnight was received with equanimity and the day proceeded normally enough.

[Little Sherri]

Fascinating and well-recounted as always. I continue to be mystified by the capricious nature of the "pee-fairies", as you called them. I wet the bed (or rather, the nappy) quite convincingly while unconscious last night, but prior to that, I went a few days not doing it, and, I went through a couple of irritating incidents of getting woken up by the Department of Emissions for permissions that they have explicitly been told they no longer require. No struggles to actually accomplish the wettings, however, just the usual throwing the valves open and drifting off to sleep. 

I did have the thought that always being in a diaper could mask nascent prostate issues; I'm only a few model years behind you, so such considerations do need to be on the radar. My dad died when I was a kid, so neither he, nor I, have any idea what shape his prostate would have been in, were he to have lived to my age, ergo, I don't have any family history to mine for clues. My grandparents did not discuss such things. 

I did have the unenviable experience of having my prostate checked, for the first time, this past summer, and nothing seemed amiss, other than my experience with lying on my side, knees up, pants half down, "discrete" man pull-up in full view, while a guy who probably makes $500000 CAD unceremoniously wiped my rear with a torn-off piece of table liner, after he jammed his finger up it. Had I known he was going to do that, I'd have gone to bathroom first, and maybe worn cologne.  

[oznl]

10 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

I continue to be mystified by the capricious nature of the "pee-fairies", as you called them. I wet the bed (or rather, the nappy) quite convincingly while unconscious last night, but prior to that, I went a few days not doing it, and, I went through a couple of irritating incidents of getting woken up by the Department of Emissions for permissions that they have explicitly been told they no longer require.

It is indeed very confusing (and frankly, a little frustrating) but others have pointed out this seems to be the way of it.  I took some solace from @WBxx's commentary (a few years further down the road than us) that where I am developmentally looks a lot like where he was around the same time.

Fast forward a couple of years and I believe he's now reliably wet most nights (I'm sure he'll chime in to validate or correct my assumption here).

If you rewind just 24 months or so, and told our past-selves that we'd be no longer reliably dry at night to the point of being compelled to wear night nappies by the close of 2022, we probably, deep down, wouldn't have believed it.

It bounces around from week to week considerably but I suspect the longitudinal trend here is slow but unmistakable.  If I continue on my current trajectory of doing nothing to stop this, I will be wet every night before too long.

Strangely, this STILL doesn't seem to bother me at all.

[Puppyz]

How did you go with that RCD unit tripping? 

Good to hear that you can broach the subject somewhat of wetting at night with the missus after all this time.

[oznl]

9 hours ago, Puppyz said:

How did you go with that RCD unit tripping?

I can't see anything obvious under the house and it hasn't happened again.  Mind you, it hasn't rained either.  I'd be interested to see if the fault reappears after rain returns.  I checked all seven split systems: they all work.  For now it remains a mystery but in my experience, these intermittent faults gradually become less intermittent over time.

9 hours ago, Puppyz said:

Good to hear that you can broach the subject somewhat of wetting at night with the missus after all this time.

Yep.  I doubt it will form the mainstay of conversation any time soon but I'm glad that this particular elephant in the room has been acknowledged.

She asked this morning how I slept last night and my answer was "I don't remember so it must have been good".  I think she knows that this kind of sleep means bedwetting for me now. 

I DID wet the bed last night again.  Went to bed dry after changing at around 10:30pm.  I can remember a vague, jumbled dream that I'd peed myself somewhere, no details except for recalling that spreading warmth/trickling sensation vividly.  That doesn't happen all the time.

When I woke at 3am, I checked and found my cloth nappy to be wet so I guess it was more than just a dream.

I may well have wet the bed on other nights it's just that I didn't go to bed dry so I'm never 100% sure.

[Cute_Kitten]

[oznl]

This week I finally made the seasonal switch to short pants at work: something that would NEVER happen in my former white collar, air-conditioned corporate world.

Usually by mid-November, we should have been living in a 24/7 sauna for well over a month already but this year has been very different.  There is some theorising that it’s to do with that massive Tahitian underwater volcano pushing an entire harbour’s worth of water vapour into the stratosphere that is currently disrupting the world weather (apart from, or in addition to any climate change factors).  All I know is that it’s been pretty weird and THAT volcano was SO big, we actually heard the sonic boom from it here in Queensland, Australia (no really we did).   Perhaps consequentially, we’ve just endured a very cool (by our standards, nobody was importing snow shovels), cloudy and damp winter followed by a cloudy, cool and damp spring.

Anyway, it finally decided to be hot and I found myself at emotional gun-point from my beloved, jump-starting the swimming pool a full 6 weeks later than usual.  This of course precipitated a brief-but-unseasonable cool change accompanied by a wind storm that put half the rear garden back into the swimming pool where it belonged.  I need to clean the pool again this weekend.

Thermal inertia being a thing though, the un-air-conditioned workshop at the office remained too hot for jeans.

I still find being at the office clad in a thick nappy and plastic pants beneath shorts to feel very, very weird.  No matter how hard I try to disregard it, I feel like an underdressed, oversized toddler.  For some reason the combination of air-cooled thighs and a warm wet padded crotch pushes sub-conscious buttons that has me continually on edge that I might be walking around in public clad only in a t-shirt and a damp nappy.

I suppose there IS a slight enhancement of exposure risk however.  Plastic pant leg elastics and a usually-wet nappy lurk only 50mm north of those short work pant leggings.

It IS cooler wearing though.  I just need to bring my sub-conscious back in off the metaphorical window ledge.

On a related note, I’ve yet to have a “new” fit Barry give me the rear-of-right-thigh damp spot on my shorts that have been unfortunately, almost normal for the “classic”, more capacious Barry worn beneath my black jeans.  This despite on one day, finishing up with a Barry that weighed 1993 grams suggesting a pee-load of more the 1.7 liters.  That is a very good innings indeed for a Barry operating in real-world battle conditions.

A couple of days ago, I switched back to a “classic” Barry and have again enjoyed the tiny-damp-spot-on-the-seat experience not every day.  Disappointingly however for Classic Barry, one such damp day saw Barry only having 1.2 liters to contend with.  That day had been a major “sitting on arse composing a presentation” day.  I realise that this usage mode is possibly the second-toughest gig for any adult nappy (eclipsed only by having a long, comfortable wee-beneath-the-sheets in one whilst laying on one’s side).

Both nappies included the bamboo “nappy liner” (since I bought 200 of them) so that should even out any operational advantage there.

The jury is still out but it’s still hinting towards the new fit Barry being somewhat less press-out-leak-at-the-bum prone than its predecessor.

Research continues.

[Stroller]

On 11/17/2022 at 8:48 AM, oznl said:

Plastic pant leg elastics and a usually-wet nappy lurk only 50mm north of those short work pant leggings.

Woah!  That's Ozzie-style shorts for you.  I spend every summer in shorts, but they're down to my knees, so no risk of exposure there.

[Little Sherri]

I'll have to have a look at whether the New Barry will be offered on any Black Friday deals. Rearz and InControl both have sales on right now. I already made one purchase, pushing my nappy inventory to approximately 10.5 cases... I actually broke out a spreadsheet and spent 30 minutes in the basement this week pursuing a fairly comprehensive inventory, knowing that sales were coming, and I needed to know what I had and where the gaps were in my lineup. 

I often feel the same way you do, @oznl, come May, here, when I start going back to shorts... it does seem like my diaper is getting more light than it does under jeans. I can only imagine what it must be like to wear a diaper under a skirt, for those so inclined. I've never worn a skirt - don't have the legs for it - but I have had the dubious pleasure of wearing a hospital gown over a diaper a couple of times, and I felt absolutely naked under such circumstances, and could not stop thinking about how I was sitting. Lack of training, I guess - more experienced people handle it on autopilot, I'm sure. I'd have worn shorts over the diaper, but the MRI tech prohibited it, lest an unconsidered metallic component succumb to a million Gauss attraction to the helium-cooled periphery of the device.  THAT outcome, aside from the ruining of a seven-figure medical imaging, device, would be hilarious... picture a man, lying in a plastic tube, in a hospital gown over a black pair of shorts, when suddenly, there is an explosion, and now the man is frantically clawing his way out of the tube, clad in a tattered gown and a diaper, while evaporating liquid helium fills the room with fog...

I don't know if the Tahitian volcano has impacted our weather here or not, but it got cold really quickly, and I now have a few centimeters of snow on my cars every morning.  Actually, in confirmation of your "cool air against the thighs" theory of increased "nappy awareness", I'll often put snow pants on over a diaper to go clear the driveway, and even thought there is nothing better at disguising "diaper lines" than pants that are, themselves, built like a giant diaper, that feeling of refrigerated nylon against my legs does indeed create an elevated sense of wearing a diaper. 

[ppdude]

Thanks for your tip and to another that I can't directly name who linked to InControl. From that link, I ended up a getting a dozen pairs of plastic pants. Part of the order came yesterday and I'm happy. Thanks!!!

 

 

[oznl]

15 hours ago, Stroller said:

Woah!  That's Ozzie-style shorts for you.  I spend every summer in shorts, but they're down to my knees, so no risk of exposure there.

Yep, I remember UK shorts.  These ones are designed for tropical tradies:  they've tough-to-the-point-of-kevlar and fairly short in the legs.  Less is more when it comes to non-insulation!  The inner crotch is where plastic pant is closest to daylight.  There's more margin for error at the outer thighs.

9 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

 I'm sure. I'd have worn shorts over the diaper, but the MRI tech prohibited it, lest an unconsidered metallic component succumb to a million Gauss attraction to the helium-cooled periphery of the device. 

I can recall a BBQ conversation with a mate who was (at the time) a biomedical engineer and told me about the time a pair of non-MRI surgical scissors somehow made it to the MRI room.  It was dramatic.

9 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

I don't know if the Tahitian volcano has impacted our weather here or not, but it got cold really quickly, and I now have a few centimeters of snow on my cars every morning.  Actually, in confirmation of your "cool air against the thighs" theory of increased "nappy awareness", I'll often put snow pants on over a diaper to go clear the driveway, and even thought there is nothing better at disguising "diaper lines" than pants that are, themselves, built like a giant diaper, that feeling of refrigerated nylon against my legs does indeed create an elevated sense of wearing a diaper. 

I think this is the thing.  It's a much larger temperature gradient between the diapered and non-diapered area.

As for the weather, it's predominately southern-hemispheric but everything is connected to everything else in the atmosphere so I've seen it speculated that there are indeed global anomalies: it's just the mechanism of action is by now reasonably clear down here.

 

[oznl]

Another leak-free week has gone by and for most of it there was very little to report.  Life goes on and I do seem to be in yet another of those interminable plateaus that seem to be the hallmarks for developmental change under permanent-nappy operating conditions. 

And then fate provided noteworthy nappy-related incident.  I was an observer rather than a participant but I’ll relate it anyway.

I’d gone out with a colleague towards the end of my working week to look at some equipment installed at a client’s home.  The property was a small apartment quite close to a beach.

I do so like to be beside the seaside.

Being close to the beach, parking was at a premium.  Fortunately the apartment complex had a few smallish visitor parking bays in a smallish lot behind the (smallish) main building.   With some careful maneuvering, I’d managed to wedge our considerably-larger-than-the-parking-bay company van into one of these, albeit wedged tightly against an ancient (1980s) four wheel drive in the bay adjacent.  The 4WD was noteworthy.  Finished fetchingly in a colour scheme of “rust” and structurally held together by bumper stickers (predominately of surfing persuasion), the interior trim consisted of split, stuffing-disgorging vinyl seats, an incredibly dusty and rudimentary set of vehicle controls and very little else.  The floors were rusted metal and the interior door cards were missing to allow manual operation of the doors by pulling on the relevant cables.   It looked like it had seen a lot of sun, sand and salt.

It was in short, the kind of car that gets used by fire brigades as a practice mule for cutting apart and extracting trapped occupants with the “jaws of life”.

“Have I left you room to get the door open enough to get out?”  I asked my colleague as he gingerly considered the minuscule gap between his passenger door and the rust bucket next to us?

“Yeah, although if I hit THAT, I don’t think anyone’s going to notice”

We weren’t to be onsite long anyway so we’d thought we’d be in and out before the other car had to move.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, we were returning to our van.  As we turned to walk up the steep driveway, ahead of us were an elderly couple also making their way, more slowly, up towards the carpark.

Mr Elderly Couple was suitably attired for any Royal garden party in a grimy singlet over a beer belly that in turn shaded over-sized, non-descript-but-ragged board shorts and sandals (no socks).

It was Mrs Elderly Couple that caught all the attention.

She was wearing a very short, very red dress: something like the “red-dress-girl” of “The Matrix” movie if you’ve seen it, or maybe Marilyn Monroe.  Kind of a chunky Marilyn Monroe and one in her her early 70s, which, if you stop to think about it, is probably 3 decades younger than Marilyn Monroe would have been had she steered clear of the Kennedy clan.  In stark contrast to her partner, the red dress was clean, pristine, and almost Hollywood in genre. 

It wouldn’t have looked out of place on a cat-walk, except for the large nappy that it wasn’t quite covering.

Yes, walking along behind her, it was abundantly and tragically clear that this short red dress was doing very little to conceal a very obvious nappy that lay at best partially beneath it.  At each phase of her slightly waddling gait, a clearly heavy, thick white bulk hanging down between her legs and hemline pendulously swung from side to side slapping her inner thighs like some kind of pee-saturated baguette.

“Umm… Okayeee….” my colleague muttered quietly beside me from our position 3 or 4 meters behind them.  “That’s one hell of a wardrobe malfunction”.

I thought it best not to share with him that I was in fairly similar underwear which was in, I suspect, a fairly similar condition (it was by then, 3pm).  I just had better-engineered outerwear covering it.

As we reached the carpark together, it became clear that their pumpkin chariot was indeed the dilapidated 4WD that we’d wedged in with our van.

Still behind them, I called out to Mr Elderly Couple as he eased his way between our vehicles to his driver side door.

“Do you need us to move our van for you?  We’re taking up way too much of that bay I know.”

“Nah” he replied affably, glancing back at us.  “I’ll just reverse it straight out.  She’ll be right…”

He then opened the unlocked door and pulled out a metal bucket on a string.  Placing the bucket in an inverted position on the ground adjacent the open door, he then proceeded to use it as a step to ascend into the 4WD before once inside, using the string again to retrieve the bucket whereupon he started the engine.  He may have used the bucket to do that too for all I know.

My colleague made a strange snorting noise from behind me.

“Nope” I said quietly.  “That’s mechanical genius”.

Meanwhile, Mrs Elderly Couple clambered into the passenger side of the rather high 4WD vehicle sans bucket.  As she rose up, so did the back of her mini-dress revealing to us behind her, practically all of the rest of her nappy-clad bum.  I could not help but notice that that the top of it at the small of her back was indeed considerably less yellowish than the lower portions.   As an expert, I instantly recognised that she BADLY needed changing.

“That can’t be good for the car seats” my colleague quietly added helpfully.  He seemed to realise the same thing.

We waited for them to reverse out before attempting to re-enter our van.  Sure enough, Mr Elderly Couple extracted the 4WD from the tight bay competently and cleanly.

As their vehicle turned to depart alongside us, Mrs Elderly Couple gave us a grin and a cheery wave from what was doubtless, her fairly squishy seat.

Of all people, I know what to look for to spot nappies on others but none of those special skills were required in this situation.  It’s been the case that I’ve seen a few folk (usually facing some kind of handicap) that may have made some sartorial poor choices (or had poor choices made for them by carers) in concealing their predicament but this appeared to be something next level.  The only way to make the presence of her nappy more obvious to bystanders would have been to wear nothing at all over it.  That red dress did not so much obscure her toddler-like underwear as highlight it.

The nappy itself was plain, white, plastic-backed and clearly fairly heavy duty.  I didn’t get a long look but I got a good one.  It didn’t look like any mainstream medical brand I could recognise.  If I’d been forced to hazard a guess, I’d say “BetterDry”.

On the face of it, Occam’s razor says that what I’d just witnessed was a tragic lapse in fashion choices from a well-intentioned-but-completely-clueless husband attempting to assist a partner-in-decline but there were contraindications.  For a start, Mrs Elderly Couple seemed considerably less declined that Mr Elderly Couple, having navigated her own way to the passenger side of the vehicle and gotten up into it without any of the mechanical aids employed by her partner.  When I’d suggested moving the van, she’d quickly glanced at the relevant infrastructure.  She was both physically and mentally reasonably online.  I’d also imagined that her cheery smile was somehow, knowing….

ABDL wasn’t invented with internet service providers.  Although we know so little about it, there are doubtless very elderly ABDL couples out there who have been ABDL couples for a very long time.  The alternate explanation here was that I was watching an ageing pair of ABDL having a day out.

I REALLY hope it was the latter and if it was, I salute them.

[Stroller]

20 minutes ago, oznl said:

Another leak-free week has gone by and for most of it there was very little to report.

You seem to find plenty to report, oznl - I've got no complaints anyway.  My life is very quiet and incident-free by comparison, which is why I don't post as often.  I only get a leak very occasionally and then only when I've been a bit lazy about changing.  They're always tiny leaks, not worth shouting about.  And I can't remember the last time I leaked at night.

Oh I really hope the couple you met were ABDL, and that you bump into them again...

[oznl]

Saturday morning saw me at my usual weekly routine, changing out of an overnight cloth nappy into a weekend day disposable (Abena L4 + booster).  Over these goes a pair of white Gary PUL plastic pants to deal with minor stray leaks and a compression pant to keep everything as stealthy and as classy as it can be given my declining physique.

My weekend “day” plastic pants see fairly light duty.  There are relatively few leaks courtesy of my new low-volume bladder and so they usually run on for a few days wear before I get guilty enough to wash them.  Habit has made me less concerned with burying my nappy gear between layers of concealment so their usual parking position would be on top of a storage rack in our walk-in robe where in former days, I stored my “pending pair” of underpants.  Well, they’re a kind of underpant…  My beloved could simply choose not to look at them I guess.

Anyway, they weren’t there when I needed them.  It was a remarkably plastic-pant-free zone.

Assuming I had somehow myself misplaced them, I checked my nappy hamper, my study nappy cupboard and my bedside underwear drawer (now a bedside plastic pant drawer).  No success.

Slightly annoyed (Gary PUL waterproof pants are NOT cheap), I found an alternate pair of a different colour in my former-underwear drawer and went on about my day.

Before long, it was early evening and time for a shower and a dry nappy.

Returning to our bedroom, it became evident that my beloved had performed one of her smash-and-grab washing raids the previous day.  There was a load of random clothing items that belonged to me washed and folded on my bed.  Some of them had even been worn, others just got into the “suck zone” of a domestic engineer in battle configuration.  My beloved is very hit and miss with respect to harvesting my washing.  I’ve lost count of the times where she takes ONE of the pair of socks that I was wearing to wash only to discard it afterwards because she can’t find its partner.  When I run out of socks and complain, she buys more.

I’ve repeatedly and gently attempted to persuade her that I’m capable of self-selecting garments for washing and transferring them to the laundry myself.  This just makes her angry because she sees it as an implied criticism of her competence in this matter.  Which it is.  Although I DON’T mind doing it myself, I wouldn’t mind her washing my clothes if she wasn’t so rubbish at it.

I paused my shower plan to firstly discover what she’d chosen to wash today and secondly to pack it away. 

Underneath the second t-shirt I couldn’t remember actually wearing and before a pair of jeans that I may have thought about wearing but then didn’t, I encountered, neatly folded, my missing pair of Gary PUL plastic pants.  They were by now suspiciously clean and lemony fresh, a state quite different from how they were early this morning.  It was probably the ONE garment she’d gathered that DID need wash.

And washed they had been.  They’d also been dried:  hung out on a clothesline apparently since running a tumble dryer in November’s oppressive heat and humidity is something NOBODY here wants her to do.

The overwhelming likelihood here is that she grabbed them accidentally, caught up in nearby garments in one of her unconditional-but-industrial-scale  “gathering” phase of her wash day.  I am reasonably sure that she did not suddenly decide to wash my plastic pants for me.

But…

In previous days, an inadvertent handling of my nappy gear would have instantly had her recoil into some passive-aggressive kind of recovery stance.  I’d find them pointedly draped on my pillow, tossed into a rubbish pail or tossed back at me with bonus low-level invective.  Instead, she’d gone on to wash and dry them.

I’ll take that as a win although I won’t push my luck by mentioning it to her.