Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[oznl]

7 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

Next time, I'll wear a better diaper, and also possibly seek a ride myself, but, the moral of the story is that I still haven't mastered the art of public diaper changes, and someday, I'll pay a price for that. 

I thought I *had* worn a better diaper.  I think my downfall here was changing directly into my night nappy at 3pm whilst massively rehydrating.  I should have just trashed a cheapie for the 3 hours before I really needed to leave and call it a 3 nappy day but no, I had to go chasing the yield curve and safety took the back seat...

[NoIllDL]

@oznl, my wife and I are considering a trip to Australia sometime in the September to December time period next year.  This will be our first foray into Oceania and I would appreciate your insight; may I DM you with some questions?

[oznl]

13 hours ago, NoIllDL said:

@oznl, my wife and I are considering a trip to Australia sometime in the September to December time period next year.  This will be our first foray into Oceania and I would appreciate your insight; may I DM you with some questions?

Sure!

[oznl]

Last weekend, in the latest instalment of my beloved’s 2023 Christmas event marathon, I found myself driving her “up the coast” to a house we own near a beach but for the most part rent out.  In between tenants, it was decided that we could “camp” in our empty house for a long weekend and indulge in all of the hedonistic pleasures that the Australian Sunshine Coast had to offer.

Mindful of the previous weeks “Tapas and Beer” near miss, I’d packed some extra nappies and an extra pair of jeans for our two nights away.  This left me precious little room for clothes in the small duffel bag allocated to me.

 

We’d left for the 2 hour drive up after work on Friday.  For the vast majority of readers who do NOT live in my part of the world, we’ve been having a cracking heatwave for the last week or so in conjunction with regular, nappy-filling-scary thunderstorms.  I was already drenched with sweat from packing the car in sauna-conditions before drenching myself further in sweat by fretting over the weather radar and wondering how I could get up there without having our car trashed by tennis-ball sized hail (that’s a thing).

I got there and a weekend away was had but proving yet again that the Pee Fairies are no respecters of place or circumstance, I wet the bed both nights.

The first evening was fraught.  After the 140km drive out through peak-hour traffic with added torrential rain and lightning, the car unpacking (still rain and thunder), camp-bed inflation, finding out what the tenants had broken before they left, organising pizza delivery and alcohol, I finally finished it, suitably refreshed, before Netflix on a camp-chair.

I fell into my dubiously-comfortable Inflata-bed at around 11pm still in a nearly-but-not-quite dry Rearz Inspire+ Mega (RIM) that I’d put on before leaving Brisbane.  Despite the nearly one litre of post-drive beer and a couple of glasses of red, dehydration seemed to be prevailing with no discernible pee production.

I slept like the dead under the white noise blankets of the room AC and the post-storm rain on the tin roof. 

I woke at around 7am to noisy birdsong in a thoroughly wet nappy with absolutely no memory of doing it.  I tried to have my morning pee in bed but there wasn’t any.  It seems I’d already had it.

Still, all good.

That next day the heat wave roared on, turning last night’s storm-fall into steam.  We spent it trying to go places whilst dodging the super-cell thunderstorms that the local atmosphere kept punching out hourly.  The heat was oppressive: 38C with dew points sitting between 24C and 27C as we pretended to have fun.

I’d worn the same Abena/Booster all day and it had simply disintegrated with sweat.  There was barely any pee in it at all.  There may have been sand though.  That’s a great idea for another Dantean level of hell by the way: being forced to trudge across plasma-hot sand dunes in fierce tropical daylight clad in a thick nappy and plastic pants with a quarter of a teaspoon of sand in them.

At night #2, once again (I was on holiday right?) I’d despatched an entire Squealer’s worth of red IPA and half a bottle of Shiraz before a tall glass of water to offset any penalty for all those units of alcohol.  I then retreated back into the AC-cool refuge of the bedroom and the dubiously-comfortable embrace of my inflatable mattress.   Somewhat unusually, I’d gone to bed in a Rearz Incontrol Hybrid Elite (Barry).  I don’t think I’d ever worn a Barry to bed before but, running late for departure, I’d grabbed a handful of whatever nappies I had to hand.  Still, Barry does a pretty good job during the day and so reassured, I fell asleep swiftly.

Once again, I woke to the sound of some exotic tropical bird yelling at the dawn.

Once again I could feel that my nappy was wet and once again I had zero recollection of when or how.  It had just somehow mysteriously become that way during the night.  The only noteworthy theme across these back-to-back bedwetting nights is that I was too busy and/or distracted to think much about bedwetting.

Unable to have my morning pee in bed (as again, I’d already done it), I rolled over to look at my watch.  In doing so, I moved out of the warm spot I was laying in to immediately realise that the adjacent bit of bottom sheet that I had NOT been laying in was strikingly cool.  And damp.  Rapidly, I pushed back the top sheet allowing the downdraft from the ceiling fan above our bed to hit my pyjama pants.  Immediately I felt them to be cold and realised they were sticking wetly to my skin where there wasn’t nappy insulating them from me.

I really HAD wet the bed. 

My beloved was already stirring beside me however and there was a considerable range of “cons” to my present situation.

• My pyjama pants were visibly wet
• The bed beneath me was visibly (and haptically) wet
• I could smell pee
• My beloved was laying less than 500mm away beside me

I quickly realised all was not lost.  As a professional pessimist, this bout of optimism was quite out of character and probably bore its origins more in desperation than in nature.  There were however some “pros” to my predicament suggesting a bread-crumb trail route to safety.

• The damage to the bedding was quite localised: beneath me.
• I was sleeping on a plastic air mattress.  There would be no lasting damage
• My first job of the day was to deflate that mattress and stuff the bedding into a laundry bag anyway.
• My beloved was anxious to pack up and leave.

Fortunately, my beloved now properly wake and NOT wearing a nappy, veritably leapt from the bed for her by now mandatory-at-early-dawn pee.  Carpe’ing this Diem, I also arose and swiftly stripped the bed before yanking the air plugs on the mattress.  My wet pyjama pants were slightly more challenging but I decided to “dress” early, pulling on some shorts over my (mostly dry) plastic pants.

“Oh” she said returning to the room to find her bed dismantled.  “Good idea.  Let’s go out for breakfast before we leave back for Brisbane”.

She didn’t notice a thing.  I got away with it.

The problem it seems was a failure of containment, not absorption.  I’d left the top of my “Barry” poking out above my terry lined plastic pants (which were curiously dry).  At some point it seems, I’d let rip laying on my side whereby my pee escaped Barry’s capture to pour out the top of the product which, being above the plastic panty line, drained directly into my remarkably-non-absorbent pyjama pants and to the bedding below, completely bypassing the terry-towelling-lined plastic pant insurance policy designed to protect against this.  It was wicking that had then expanded the puddle.

Given that “security for side sleepers” is one of the brand promises for Barry, I must conclude either marketing BS, operator error, or some combination of the two.

I made sure it was ME that dealt with throwing the bedding into the washer when we got home though.  It was just as well.  It was noticeably damp and smelled of pee.  The inflatable air mattress got (in a “Silence Of The Lambs” moment), the hose again.  It’s not the first time it had seen pee action.

I sing the praises of “glamping” but also, this was NOT something that I could afford to have happen at a Hilton.  Next time it will be an Inspire Mega to bed with much more care taken with respect to water-proofing my outerwear.

[Little Sherri]

8 hours ago, oznl said:

I sing the praises of “glamping” but also, this was NOT something that I could afford to have happen at a Hilton. 

This is one of my persistent nightmare scenarios. Not that it couldn't be navigated, but, I really don't want to have to, just as I really don't want to have to smile self-deprecatingly between grimaces of agony, when EMT's cut my trousers off in order to access my fractured femur, but in the process also expose my mermaid-themed diaper. 

I've been through this when travelling with kids - my youngest in particular takes after her dad, and has soaked a couple of hotel beds, and one on a cruise ship, even though she had a pull-up on, at least once triggering a temporary return to tape-on diapers for the overnight shift. 

The worst-case scenario for me plays out thusly: a good friend of ours is an executive at an international hotel chain, and he has extended amazing deals to us for our own travels, and absolutely shocking deals if he's travelling with us. However, when we arrive at the hotel with him, he immediately presses the flesh, talking with everyone from the bell cap to the general manager. We always drink heavily when we travel together. Pissing in one of his beds would be very impolite. It's like staying at someone's house, if that someone has servants who make up the beds and put chocolates on them every day while you're out golfing. I'd have to bundle up the sheets and throw them off the balcony and then claim it was the result of a freak meteorological event. 

"Micro-tornado? Never heard of that."

"Oh yes, they're more common than you think. Came through the balcony door, sucked the sheets right off my bed, and back out it went." 

[oznl]

I’ve just completed my 5th consecutive nappy-clad Christmas. 

I’d wet the bed Christmas eve which was some kind of present I suppose.  It was the usual, somewhat-subdued modus operandi of bedwetting that seems to be what my body does lately.  I wasn’t completely dry when I went to bed.  There were no “pee dreams” and nor was there a “Eureka” moment where I realised I’d wet (or WAS wetting) the bed.  All that happened was I awoke the next morning to find my night nappy to be thoroughly wet, my bladder to be thoroughly empty and my mind thoroughly devoid of ANY recollection about how any of this came to be.

Christmas here is always hot.  Daytime temperatures in the mid-30s (that’s Celsius) with dewpoints in the mid-20s (still Celsius).  This year the nights have been hot too.

Perfect weather for thick nappies and plastic pants.  Every “hot” season (which in my part of the world is usually 6 months long) has me reflecting on the bizarre Dantean level of hell I have constructed for myself with such strange sartorial decisions.  And yet I still do it.

Christmas is also our “storm season” when severe thunderstorms are not uncommon.  The last few years have seen very quiet storm seasons with little to no activity.  2023 therefore decided to make up for lost time.  We’ve been smashed by violent super-cell thunderstorms every afternoon since last Friday.  Yesterday was the 5th consecutive day where the words “severe” and “thunderstorm” appeared on the official local weather forecast.

Christmas eve must have been a particularly wild ride for Santa in his sleigh down here as 160 kmh wind gusts and hail up to 16cm (seriously) in diameter walloped South East Queensland in waves.  If you didn’t finish up with holes in your roof, it would have at least been plastered with reindeer-chunks.

Christmas morning was its usual intense South East Queensland climatic experience: that crazy-intense Australian deep blue sky juxtaposed against an impossibly deep green humidity-fuelled garden.  Cicadas and insects roared at me to the point of my ears ringing as I baked between the ragingly harsh sun and pizza-oven-paving stones burning up through my thongs, fishing garden out of the swimming pool where the previous evening’s thunderstorm had tossed it.

I couldn’t just jump in as I was clad in a damp (mostly sweat) Abena L4, booster-pad, plastic pants, compression pants and shorts.  It’s a shame I didn’t have some snow-shoes to complete the ensemble.

Did I mention I had nappy rash?  In terms of ABDL pursuit, it doesn’t get its name up in neon but put together heat waves, dehydration, yard work and nappies and nappy rash is never far behind (did you get that?)

This one took the form of a bright red racing stripe, almost geometric-straight down the valley floor of what practitioners call the “intergluteal cleft” or what normal people might call the “bum crack”.

Awesome.  Ho, ho, ho…

Almost certainly fungal in nature (since vanilla nappy rash is a form of contact dermatitis and typically manifests where skin touches wet nappy), I’ve commenced what will not doubt be a 14 day cycle of topical Canestan ointment but it still stings.

After a moisture and heat laden build-up, our Christmas Day party ended early evening with, you guessed it, another rampaging line of super-cell thunderstorms that saw nearly 100,000 people without power, unroofed houses, arterial roads blocked by fallen trees, two deaths and a garden in my swimming pool featuring flora that I simply don’t own.  Presumably it had commuted in from houses down the street.  Further to our south, a quasi-linear-convective-system (I had to research THAT one to understand what I was reading) spat out a tornado that wreaked a 50km path of Dorothy and Toto level destruction from the Gold Coast hinterland nearly all the way to the coast in the process, closing down all of the major theme parks due to damage before the thousands of tourist children who’d flown across the country to use them.

Our kids fled our Christmas lunch at the first break in the weather radar to get their cars home and rescue panicked pets.

Boxing Day saw me spending another nappy-clad-in-a-furnace hour vacuuming out the pool (again) so that re-visiting kids and their friends might swim.  Just for giggles, I threw in another $50 of chemicals to try and stop a nutrient-rich saline solution idling at 30C from growing anything whilst our customary post-Christmas barbecue was underway.  Shortly after lunch, another series of super-cells blew through forcing a rapid indoor-retreat of the formerly-out-on-the-rear-deck event as guests nervously checked their phones and worried about their cars.  We had 62mm of rainfall (with about 5% of that falling as ice) in less than 60 minutes as a garden belonging somewhere in an adjacent suburb landed in the pool.

Thusly, another celebration met its untimely end.

We still did well.  We still have a house AND electricity (so far, the day is young).  Acquaintances nearby (in slightly, semi-rural in a range-rover-and-pony-demographic kind of area) lost power their on the Christmas Eve storm.  The power company has told them to expect an update on restoration next Sunday.  They spent part of their Christmas day driving around fallen trees into town to dump their rotting Christmas dinner at a council bin which to me just seems indescribably sad.  At a greater scale, the death toll from this round of storms stands at 7: falling trees, flash flooding and boat capsizes.

My beloved, a little depressed at how Christmas unfolded, has been quite subdued.  When I forgot to remove my balled-up wet night nappy from our ensuite yesterday, she simply relocated it to the walk-in-robe shelf without comment.  When I forgot and told her I was going upstairs to “change myself” instead of “get dressed” (I was still in my pyjamas and night nappy), she simply didn’t react.  She’s not talking much either.

The storms are forecast to ease today as a heatwave sets in culminating in another round of severe storms by New Year’s Eve. 

And now, having changed out of my soggy night BetterDry into a daytime Abena/booster, I’m off to clean blown-in vegetation out the pool before it gets (much further) above 30C.

[Little Sherri]

I was wondering how you were doing - your weather has been sufficiently notable to have been noted on this side of the planet. I'm glad to hear that your roof is intact, you have power, and your cars don't sport 16 cm dents. Our weather has been remarkably unremarkable - we've had a Vancouver December, which has people scratching their heads and wondering aloud whether climate change might actually benefit us up here in the not-yet-frozen North. It's been 5 C and raining, consistently. My snowblower remains at the back of the garage. The ski hill operators are pulling their hair out, which is apparently also the case in BC, where the frigid peaks that are expected to be devoid of snow for maybe 8 weeks through July and August, are devoid of snow, in December. 

Congrats on 5 Christmases in nappies! I'm on my 4th. 

[oznl]

What is it with all the weird Temu ads lately?

Despite never having used their platform or even (for the most part), clicked on a link, it seems that lately, my internet is being carpet-bombed by Temu ads.  Everywhere I look on a page, Temu has insinuated itself into the landscape with ads featuring (and here’s the problem), what appears to be some pretty weird fetish gear.  When a grown-up who chooses to wear (and use) nappies all the time tells you something is pretty weird, that’s not a warning to take lightly.

My Temu ads have included head-shots of rather startled looking female models with what appears to be large rubber gob-stoppers jammed in their mouths (for the record, I don’t “do” pacifiers).  Also on high rotation are what look like stainless-steel mesh chastity cages and assorted steam-punk body clamps.  The odd “cat-O-9-tails” whip is also regularly featured on websites dealing with such shady content as weather, local news or groceries.

Naturally, my guilty mind turns to some kind of distorted cross-talk from my secret online

The thing is, anything nappy-related that I DO access, I access from a completely separate, non-Chrome instance of a web browser (Firefox), running in in-cognito mode and bristling with tracker-scouring technologies on my OWN device (which is of itself, quite well secured).  I am not untrained in the black arts of cyber security and outside of Chrome (which is a bit of an open book no matter how hard you try to lock it down), I am the web-browsing equivalent of a black hole. I know what pixel trackers are and how they work and I don’t use free email services either.  It’s not like I’m even interested in acquiring a black leather female underwear so where Temu’s conclusion that offering me same repeatedly might be useful comes from is a mystery.

Last night a new low: escaping the famously-awful dross that Australian free-to-air TV networks serve up between Christmas and new-year, my beloved and I fled for the televisual wastelands of You-Tube.  For the record, my YouTube history consists largely of nerd/engineering entertainment interspersed with my beloved’s comic cat videos.  Regardless of such innocent intent, instantly, a Temu ad instantly appeared suggesting a leather teddie might be in order for one or both of us.

That was awkward. 

Naturally, I was implicitly and instantly held responsible by my beloved.

“That’s nothing.  All I seem to see is ads with women wearing rubber accessories in orifii these days” she announced flatly, looking across at my admittedly-puffy crotch and hardening her expression.  The plural of "orifice" is "orifices", not "orafii" but it didn't seem the time nor place to correct here.

The interesting point was the insight that it's not just MY internet experience under siege then.

I’m assuming that they’re using some kind of “fingerprinting” technology based on our originating IP address, possibly also looking at general web traffic out at some content aggregator level rather than cookies on an endpoint box.  That might explain the crude, shotgun style content targeting. 

It’s possible the off-beat fetish gear may be instigated by “Fetlife” traffic.  I’m on there.   There are obviously limits to the resolution of their interest-identification mechanism and “fetish” is likely the broad church into which I find myself demographically cast.  I’ve never been offered good deals on adult nappies by Temu.  For a while Google did throw a lot of Tena and Depends ads at me until I secured my browser and nuked my Google cache but even then, it just targeted me, not the household network.

I suppose I could fix this with a VPN but I find the whole process of showering my entire subnet with fetish gear ads to be at best tasteless and at worst, outright damaging.  I also don’t see why I should have to pay for a VPN (and slower internet).  I’ve found myself in the curious position of reporting ads as offensive back to Google.

On the upside, I now have a pretty good grasp on what my beloved’s preferred browsing habits are.  There are only so many cute toys for babies and shoe ads that I can be held responsible for.

[Stroller]

1 hour ago, oznl said:

The interesting point was the insight that it's not just MY internet experience under siege then.

I seem to have escaped this sort of thing, so far - no idea exactly how.  And Mummy has her own laptop and accounts, so there's little danger of any crossover there, unless your scattergun IP theory is correct.  We use Firefox as well, and Thunderbird for mail.  Firefox deletes all cookies every time I close it, and I always opt for minimal cookies whenever I get the chance.  I haven't yet gone down the VPN route, mostly because I can't be bothered trying to understand how it helps.

Amazon's browsing history still annoys me though - I've not found a way of automatically deleting it, but then I've not tried very hard either.

I take it your other half hasn't yet been tempted by the rubber accessories?  Maybe you need to check her bedside drawer just in case...

[Little Sherri]

I use a VPN and it seems to help. I don't get a lot of lifestyle-assumption bleed-over into the civilian radio channels. I don't use a lot of social media, generally, but when I do, the ads mostly pertain to crap we buy on Amazon. I do get more than my share of Depends and Tena stuff, but I think that relates to having sometimes bought things from a very legit medical diaper supplier without donning the cloak of the VPN, because some of it was for my parents. 

As to why I use a VPN, well, my work computers have always integrated them, and my current employer flatly mandates that everything other than checking the weather be done over the VPN, baud rate be damned, so I assumed it was a good practice, because they certainly throw a lot of money at it. I don't know if my $100 a year buys me much security or not, but it is fun being able to pretend I'm in the UK or the US if I want to, and thus get the local ads or see what's to be had that won't get offered to a shmuck in Canada. 

[FretaBWet]

If you could only get a VPN delivery address so you could pretend to get Northshore deliveries at US prices.

Hugs,

Freta

[oznl]

Alas the long torpor-ridden days of nothingness between Christmas and New Year have gone, replaced by the dreary rituals of being woken by a clock and the gradual drift back to working life.

New Year’s Eve was a quiet affair as it tends to be for us.  We’d spent the early evening in a cheese-infused-nibbles-and-booze festival with our neighbours which is something of a street tradition.  Consequentially, the latter part of New Year’s Eve consisted of an eclectic mix of Champagne, Netflix and baked beans on toast.

I went to bed in a slightly wet nappy: the sixth consecutive New Year’s Eve for which I have done so.

I probably wet in my sleep a bit.  I don’t really know.  That’s an odd thing about this time of year.  I dimly recalled similar feelings this time last year but of course, I have a chronicle that I can check.  It turned out those dim feelings were quite correct.  Towards the end of my Christmas break in late 2022/early 2023, I’d largely lost sight of what was happening in my nappies overnight so this DOES seem to be a repeating pattern: go on holidays, throw the wake/work/sleep routine out the window, lose insight into bed-wetting.

I couldn’t swear that I WAS bedwetting continuously.  It was just that I had no recollection and every morning started with me finding myself wet and empty bladdered.  It’s possible I was waking to do that but it’s a kind of Donald Rumsfeld scenario:  an unknown, unknown…

My beloved was generally tolerant.  I even woke up one morning to find her cuddling me from behind with her arm across my nappy, her hand resting gently on the front of it.  This was more about thermodynamics than romance.  My beloved is firmly of the view that an air conditioner’s heat pumping capacity is governed exclusively by how cold a temperature the thermostat is set for.

If an AC is struggling to pull a room at 30C down to 22C then the obvious solution is to set that AC’s target temperature down to 16C.  The thermal displacement capacity of the heat pump inside a given AC is just a kind of manufacturer conspiracy to extract more money out of gullible consumers.

She’d insisted on leaving the bedroom AC on overnight (aimed at zero degrees Kelvin presumably) despite a storm markedly dropping the outside air temperature.  Relieved of its usual Sysyphusian task of cycling on and off (mostly on) in a desperate attempt to drag our furnace-like bedroom down to 21C, it cheerfully and effortlessly refrigerated its occupants.

Still, waking up and finding herself cuddling her husband’s wet night nappy (a kind of hot water bottle I suppose) without immediately shrieking and leaping out of bed is something I regard as progress.

I'll think about the VPN.  It would be nice to watch Netflix Europe and North America.

[Little Sherri]

On 1/4/2024 at 8:08 PM, oznl said:

My beloved is firmly of the view that an air conditioner’s heat pumping capacity is governed exclusively by how cold a temperature the thermostat is set for.

I live under these conditions as well. My wife sets the AC to 16 C if the temperature inside the house is 23 C, assuming it will get to 21 C, her target, faster than if she, you know, set it for 21 C. She does the inverse of this in the winter, in her car - the climate control has an auto setting and you can set it to a comfortable 22 C and the turn on the heated seats and the heated steering wheel and be warm and toasty, but, no, when she first starts the car, and the coolant is still at -5 C because there has only been combustion occurring in the 400 lb lump of metal that is the engine for 30 seconds, she disables the auto function, cranks the temperature to 28 C (its highest setting), and the forces the fan to run on full, thus effectively air conditioning the already frigid cabin and actually delaying the time it takes for the engine to reach the operating temperature. 

She has learned, however, not to try this technique with the heating system in the house, because it is separate from the A/C and distributes its heat via radiators. So, the response time is slow, and there is potential for a massive overshoot. She once set the thermostat for 25 C, hoping to expedite a rise to 21 C, and that undertaking had us all opening windows in February as some rooms became downright tropical. 

It's right there in the name, people: thermo (temperature) - stat (from static, IE, unchanging, stationary). Some of the newer systems might employ multiple stages and/or zones, but for the most part, a request for heat, or cooling, is effectively a request for maximum heat, or maximum cooling, until the set point is reached. The equipment has a certain heat creation/heat redistribution capability when it is on. Telling it to gun for an absurd value doesn't make it work any harder or faster, it just runs longer. Or perpetually. 

[oznl]

I posted the update below in @Little Sherri's thread as he was talking about dreams which resonated quite markedly with what I was planning to update on this week and of course, I responded in his thread.  The update really should have gone here so for completeness, I'll post it twice:

Some rather unusual “pee dreams” happened this week.  In a curious parallel to Little Sherri, I’ve had a few pee dreams lately.

The first occurred sometime after I’d woken at around 1am to find myself (annoyingly) dry.   For some reason, despite plenty of beers earlier that night, I didn’t feel any need to pee.  Still I managed to dribble a bit into my dry cloth pull up nappies before falling back asleep, probably still dripping.

Suddenly I was on an airliner.  It was a strange kind of flight, some kind of pseudo-military joyride.  It was one of those giant military freighter planes, the type that has a giant door for a bum that you can drive tanks out of.  This one also had comfortable seats and windows, just like an Airbus but you could get up, wander down to the back and look out that enormous rear cargo door to view the terrain below us rushing past at an alarming rate.  We’d just shot up to high altitude for a bit of in-flight refuelling from a tanker aircraft (as you do) and now we were heading back over the coastline at low altitude, presumably to stay out of enemy radar.

I returned to my seat to find myself sporting pale denim shorts covering not a nappy but instead, an indwelling urinary catheter.  A leg bag half-filled with dark pee was strapped to my left thigh poking out cheerfully under the legging of my shorts.

That’s different.

I could clearly feel minor, ineffectual bladder spasms which presumably accompanied pee that dripped and drizzled utterly beyond my control in the manner of the catheterised (I’ve had the experience once, in hospital, didn’t particularly enjoy it).  Rather disturbingly, I had a fairly distinct “wet pants” sensation accompanying these spasms.

Looking down again at my lap, I saw a dark glistening patch on the crotch of my short and realised instantly that some (or possibly ALL) of my pee was routing around my catheter and into my pants.

I couldn’t stop it.  I was catheterised.  I just watched in dismay as the wet patch grew slowly as the relentless drips and dribbles continued.  This went on for an indeterminate period of time.  Occasionally, I noticed a stronger bladder spasm but all of this was 100% irrelevant: as on the aircraft, I was merely a passenger along for the ride.

After I while, I decided to stand up and go for a walk.  It made a change from peeing on the airline seat.

My pale blue denim shorts did absolutely nothing to disguise what was happening.   It was patently obvious that I’d substantially wet myself, and was continuing to do so.

I crossed the aisle into the back yard that was beside it (this is a dream right?  It’s ok to have a house and back yard adjacent seat 47B on an aircraft).  For some reason I stood beneath a clothesline that was densely populated with suspiciously nappy-like garments.

Looking down, I felt warm wet shorts sticking to my crotch as I felt another dribble of pee run down somewhere across my pubic area beneath them.

At this point, a random passenger came across and threw the pee-soaked mat that had been beneath my feet at my aircraft seat across at me.  It landed with a soggy “thud” in front of me, disintegrating on landing.

Just as I picked it up off the lawn, I found myself explaining “I was just getting rid of this” to the bemused homeowner who appeared behind me to investigate with a catheterised guy in wet shorts was holding a dripping and disintegration pee-mat in his back yard opposite an airliner seat aisle.

It was landing time anyway.  By the time I got back near my seat, it was time to get off the plane.  I hadn’t even stowed my tray table.

Other passengers were shuffling forward past my soaked seat ahead of me.

“What happened there?” one asked.

“We all know how that got there but HE won’t own it…” replied another, glancing back at me.

I woke up.  I was wet but I was wet anyway when I went to bed so who knows.

Then I had another one last night.  This time, I was sitting in the driver seat of a car and I needed to pee.  At the same time, I realised that flood waters were rising around the car and soon the car cabin would have water in it.

Under normal circumstances, this would be an excellent point to panic.  This however was a dream so instead I thought to myself “Oh cool, I really need to pee and NOW I can just stay sitting here and do it in my pants because soon everything around me is going to be wet anyway!”  I guess the general unreality of missing the “soon you will be gasping and screaming before undergoing an unpleasant, but short death by drowning” was balanced by the sad fact that when sitting in a car facing such a fate, peeing in ones pants is probably par for the course.

Anyway.  I went ahead and wet my dream-pants just sitting there in the car because it didn’t matter and nobody would ever find out.  I immediately felt a remarkably realistic burst of creeping, heavy, humid heat at my crotch replete with the odd trickling sensation.

I suspect that sensation really WAS taking place inside my nappy at that point in time and I was just dreaming my way through it.  I can’t be certain because I was a bit wet when I fell asleep but I can’t be certain ANY night these days.  I just remembered that dream clearly the next morning.  As usual, I’d been wet to some extent all night so who knew what happened when?

The first dream was thematic and I suspect another example of mental self-flagellation whereby I punish myself for what is objectively, an at best highly unusual but more probably sharply socially disapproved lifestyle choice.  There may or may not have been co-incidental bedwetting.  Certainly in my dream there was little I could do to stop things.

The second I conclude to be an oneirological metaphor that one part of my brain used to explain to another why we weren’t going to bother removing any clothing, getting up or even waking up in order to have our 3am wee this morning.

[Little Sherri]

On 1/11/2024 at 5:21 PM, oznl said:

I posted the update below in @Little Sherri's thread as he was talking about dreams which resonated quite markedly with what I was planning to update on this week and of course, I responded in his thread.

I've done that before. Once I sat down, read your thread, then wrote up something of my own, which didn't even referenced what you'd written... and then posted it on your thread, thinking I had at some point moved over to mine. It would be like me coming to Australia and then inviting some friends over for beers in your backyard. Which I would tell you about, while we were sitting in your backyard. "Oh, by the way..." 

[oznl]

Does circumcision make nappies nicer?

It’s not a workplace conversation that one might expect to have but these days I work in the disability sector where, regrettably, non-discretionary adult nappies are a fact of life.  It’s not something I think about to any extent (beyond diverting the odd opened-and-therefore-to-be-discarded pack of product away from immediate landfill).  I have zero prurient interest in their plight and in any case, the medical nappies foisted upon them are for the most part, nearly useless.

It can and does however come up in conversation.  I didn’t instigate this particular conversation and I wasn’t even a part of it.  I was only in earshot as it just spilled out before me like some bizarre manifestation of Douglas Adam’s “infinite improbability drive”.

I blame the loads of allied health practitioners and former nurses floating around.  Away from patients they speak with alarming frankness.

The precipitating conversation took place this week and its genesis was simple enough:  somebody’s family had a brand new baby and a handful of ex-nurses were discussing it.  After the usual mundane discussions of foetal weights and measures (and their almost gleeful ruminations on head circumference), they inevitably moved on to the more gruesome topics of birthing; extraneously extruded entrails, shocking co-morbidities, labours longer than the Crimean wars, the usual nurse-ly chit chat they have over tea and biscuits.

Then, in a startling turn, the conversational compass lurched towards the thorny question of whether or not the parents intended to circumcise the child (hopefully it was a boy).

The nursing consensus was that fashion said “no” but there were vague health arguments suggesting “yes” may be the wiser course.

An older nurse from aged care was particularly opiniated: “Foreskins can cause loads of problems later in life…  I remember when I was working in geriatrics we’d often have problems with older uncircumcised men.  They couldn’t really take care of themselves down there and as often as not, they’d be in pads (nappies).  Things often got ghastly down there and I’ve actually seem some who’ve had to get circumcised in later life just to help with the constant infections…”

Well THERE’S something I never knew.

I myself AM circumcised.  This was done not through any Jewish heritage but (allegedly) by my Grandmother’s command.  I always regarded my Granny to be reasonably Granny-like but according to my own mother, she was a tyrant to be tremblingly obeyed.  An (apocryphal) tale she shared with me as a young child was how my Granny had once thrashed my father with an ironing cord to the point of having to conceal his injuries from others for “speaking in church”.  Apparently if Granny decided that my right eye had offended me in my infancy, I'd have much poorer depth perception today.

My mother had her own problems I think.  Still, the story went that Granny had ordered my mother that this procedure be done to me (and by implication, NOT my mother) since Granny had it done to my own father (it was “cleaner”) and, it “didn’t hurt him” according to her (technically it didn’t hurt HER),

And so it was done.  At best, I have no recollection of it.

It has been relatively smooth sailing in the downstairs department despite constant heat and humidity.  I’ve had a handful of minor nappy rashes but nothing serious.  As far as I know, I don’t smell (I suspect my beloved would let me know swiftly if I did) and I’ve completely avoided the dreaded urinary tract infection which is apparently something of the bain for many in the 24/7 diapered community.

I’d put this down to my well known list of countermeasures:  being as bald as a badger in my nappy zone, regular, sparing zinc cream use at change time along with a hand-shower squirt of the relevant area (most changes) but, based on up-to-date nursing chit-chat, perhaps being circumcised is the reason behind my free ride here.

I’m sure there’s a PHD for somebody in that.

[Little Sherri]

On 1/18/2024 at 3:24 AM, oznl said:

Well THERE’S something I never knew.

Me neither. Interesting. As it happens, although no rabbis were ever consulted (my ancestors were a Protestant lot, and a few succumbed to the call of Anglicanism), I was surgically altered as an infant, as well. 

My children are female, so circumcision is generally discouraged, hence it was never an issue we had to wrestle with in our household. However I have a few nephews, and half of them likewise received genital cosmetic surgery as infants. The reasoning went "We want them to look like their dads" (which was an excess of information, as an side), but no male child ever "looks like their dad" down there until they're of an age where, hopefully, they haven't seen their dads equipment in quite a while, and even if they have, they're at the point developmentally where they could reason through esthetic differences. So I never quite bought the explanation. I think my sisters just thought it looked cleaner. 

Most of the alleged hygienic advantages have been disproven, although there is an outlier statistic about susceptibility to HIV that stubbornly correlates quite dependably with intactness. It might have to do with skin toughness, absent the tuque. But this whole "later in life, when you'll be wearing nappies" aspect is one I had not considered. 

[oznl]

I had one of those excruciatingly awkward moments of domestic nappy angst this week.  Leaving a wet Abena L4 balled up on our walk-in-robe shelf paled into insignificance.

My beloved and I were watching Trent Dalton’s “Boy Swallows Universe” on Netflix. 

As an aside, it’s a slightly curious experience watching this mini-series as we live in the very city it is set in (“Bluey” is also set in Brisbane although as you’d expect, the absence of photorealism makes precise geo-location tricky).  Not so with “Boy Swallows Universe”.  The infamous “Darra” suburb of Trent’s childhood is in fact just a few minutes’ drive away from our home and traversing it is a part of my daily commute.   Many of the landmarks were instantly familiar to us although Darra itself has somewhat-gentrified since the mid-1980s.  This necessitated the filmed house itself NOT to be in Darra but rather the distinctly un-gentrified suburb of “Beenleigh”, some considerable distance away.  Presumably they had to drag quite a few abandoned cars off bricks and cull a load of Pit Bull Terriers (and possibly a few residents) before it was safe for a film crew down there.

In any case, in the episode we were watching, one of the heroes “Gus” was pushing “Shelley”, his muscular-dystrophy-afflicted girlfriend along a path in her wheelchair.  Her disabilities had been slowly extending in magnitude throughout the series.  At this point she can no longer walk.  Alone with him on a Darra footpath, she raises the physiological gorilla in the room with respect to them pursuing a relationship in the cohorts typical blunt idiom.

“How do you feel about changing adult nappies?  ‘Cos that’s where this is heading just so you know…” Shelley warned him bleakly glancing down at her dysfunctional lower half in the wheelchair.

“Well, that’s just something to look forward to.” Gus replied with a faint smile.

A short conversation about the likelihood of her experiencing a premature death ensues.  Gus persists that he wishes to remain with her.

“You just want to go to bed with me” she says.

After pausing for a second or two, Gus replies with a lewd grin:  “Nah, I’m in it for the nappies!”

I realised then that my beloved was now looking directly at me sitting beside her.  My shorts were almost comically puffy from the less-than-visually-stealthy terry nappy and plastic pant combo pinned beneath them (it was to be my night nappy and so I was less concerned with aesthetics than I was dry bedding by morning).

The 700 milliseconds silence or so before the story jump-cut to a new scene lasted for what seemed like days…

[Little Sherri]

On 1/25/2024 at 2:17 AM, oznl said:

The 700 milliseconds silence or so before the story jump-cut to a new scene lasted for what seemed like days…

It's never quite been that on-the-nose for me, but it does seem like the universe has a sense of humour, or is at least tapping me on the shoulder, on occasion when I watch television with my wife in our bedroom. She required a wind-down hour of mindless TV before she can fall asleep, and this, regardless of what time it is - even if we get home at 1 AM, sometimes she still needs her fix. I can occasionally talk her into watching something less banal, in which case we stream some series or other that we've both agreed to, something mild by my standards, that she finds borderline too stimulating for bedtime viewing. So, Breaking Bad is off the table, but I might steer her past Gilmore Girls. 

But a lot of the time, I'll just let her be her, and read newspaper articles online with half an eye, and then at some point ask her to move whatever drivel she's rewatching onto her phone, so that I can fall asleep to a fainter flickering glow than is provided by the flatscreen on the wall across from our bed. 

I've documented these instances when it occurs to me, although there are more of them than I have counted, but typically, the plot on whatever she's watching briefly involves diapers somehow. The latest example was a mom jokingly presenting her late-teens daughter with a bill for her upbringing, and as she's running through it, she says that the last line item is diapers, she sure used a lot of diapers, what was she doing with all those diapers...?

And of course I'm sitting there, next to her, in a diaper. This example has nowhere near the sting of what you're describing, but, this happens with some frequency. Another memorable one was Gordon Ramsay on one of his shows excoriating some unfortunate restauranteur about what had been served to him, and saying that it looked like what you'd find in a diaper. That was in a commercial for the show, which was available on the streaming service, and they ran the commercial four times an hour for a year. Or a baking competition show where they were making a flan or something, and the catch phrase delivered by the host is that "Nobody likes a soggy bottom!", and they reran that clip endlessly, and the first time we saw it, my wife had said "Well, some people do" in a droll deadpan. Or some high school soap opera where everyone is pregnant, and one of the characters was chasing around a toddler who was in a diaper, and throwing diapers around like confetti, and the teenaged mom was lamenting that she couldn't wait to be done with the diaper stage, and every second one-liner in the show involved it being time to change the baby again...

[Little Sherri]

An update to our ongoing conversation on this topic, @oznl; Barry has officially been made redundant. Sorry to have to break it to you. I got an email from Incontrol this morning announcing that this was the last chance to stock up, and to "please note that we'll be discontinuing this diaper." 

Apparently they have medium and XL left, in bags or cases. The case price on the XL's isn't bad, at $102 CAD. I know this has no bearing on what you would pay for them, after the addition of the Australian Tax. 

However, they pivoted immediately, wording it thusly: "If you liked Elite, you will LOVE Incontrol BeDry EliteCare Premium Incontinence Briefs." SO, they've given the chosen successor to the Elite Hybrid Incontinence Brief an even longer name, I guess befitting its alleged increased capacity, which they say is 10,000 ML, "Promising 12+ hours of leak resistance, and, the reassurance of Whiff-X Technology." 

I eagerly await your naming them. Cecil? Bernard? Theodore? 

[oznl]

16 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

An update to our ongoing conversation on this topic, @oznl; Barry has officially been made redundant. Sorry to have to break it to you. I got an email from Incontrol this morning announcing that this was the last chance to stock up, and to "please note that we'll be discontinuing this diaper." 

Apparently they have medium and XL left, in bags or cases. The case price on the XL's isn't bad, at $102 CAD. I know this has no bearing on what you would pay for them, after the addition of the Australian Tax. 

However, they pivoted immediately, wording it thusly: "If you liked Elite, you will LOVE Incontrol BeDry EliteCare Premium Incontinence Briefs." SO, they've given the chosen successor to the Elite Hybrid Incontinence Brief an even longer name, I guess befitting its alleged increased capacity, which they say is 10,000 ML, "Promising 12+ hours of leak resistance, and, the reassurance of Whiff-X Technology." 

I eagerly await your naming them. Cecil? Bernard? Theodore? 

Ave Barry, mopping up after me for nearly three years.

As it happens, I'd moved on anyway having "upgraded" myself to the Inspire Mega+ for daywear as I'd tired of Barry press-out leaks at my right rear thigh.

We're quite used to watching last year's North American TV specials the following July and so I suspect things will stagger on in a kind of stock-depletion half-life for another year or so before we finally bury Barry.

I'll wait warily to see what happens to Barry's successor.

 

[oznl]

Don’t get comfortable.  A ceasefire is not an armistice.

For many years I’ve had a pre-existing health condition.  It’s not major (now, thanks to a whole bunch of surgeries) but very occasionally, I experience bouts of a cardiac issue.  I think I’ve mentioned it before so I’ll spare the gory details.

For some reason, in the last week or so it’s been back.  Sometimes it does this.  Whilst not debilitating, it IS concerning and it does have an energy-sapping effect: It’s like somebody took out one of your batteries.  Stress can bring it on.  Whilst I wouldn’t consider myself stressed right now, we are in a protracted period of heatwaves featuring severe storms and the occasional cyclone.  We’ve had hot days AND hot nights with insane dewpoints: 26C or more.  This may well have something to do with things.

Eventually, my beloved spotted the tell-tale signs an issue: principally my sudden affinity for couches, some evident fatigue and my smart watch continually alarming because it thinks my pulse has stopped.

Her solution to my potential stress of course is to demand evidence at 8 minute intervals showing a steady progression back to normality.  “I really don’t need this right now” she sighed.  Strictly speaking, neither did I.

On Sunday morning we were having breakfast together.  I was yet again in a bit of an episode, swallowing fast-acting beta blockers and looking pale.  Together we reminisced about the endless series of futile hospital day procedures I was subjected to once it had become very clear that in an echo of the old Verve song, the drugs don’t work.

 “Well the awkward thing is if THAT happens again, I’m going to have to rock up to the hospital in a nappy.  It’s not like I’d be able to stay dry sleeping through any procedure.”

I don’t know why I had to go and poke that bear.  She really does NOT want to know ANYTHING about this lifestyle choice but I was still slightly surprised by her answer.

“Well you’ll HAVE to do something to sort that first!”, her voice suddenly clipped and her gaze hardened.  Sympathy evaporated from her in a small huff of invisible steam.

Yep.  No cardiac medical interventions for YOU sir!  Not until you’ve taught yourself not to embarrass your beloved.  I’m well aware that I can demand nothing more than grim tolerance but it seemed a little harsh and also a little impractical.

“I’m not sure I CAN” I replied.  “I think that ship has sailed”.

Her lips compressed even further and she turned away to gaze out across the garden.  This conversation was officially, toast.

I was a little bit unimpressed with her priorities here and so, the conversation reprised the next morning when I again, greeted the dawn with a resting “pulse” (if you could call it that) of 123 beats per minute.

“Well” I commented to her, slightly miffed at yesterday’s complete lapse in sympathy “No medical interventions for ME because I woke up wet again this morning”.

Again, her face turned to chiselled stone.

I pushed on.

“I’ve been in nappies for 5 years now, what did you expect and do you seriously expect me to avoid medical treatment?”

“That’s NOT what I said” she replied in a clipped voice, completely failing to nominate just what she thought she MIGHT have said despite the actual words she employed.

Again, the topic was closed.

I guess the silver lining to her “YOUR death before MY dishonour” strategy was that I could foresee a path whereby I’d actually get a nappy change from her.  Well, half a nappy change.  More of a nappy removal really and it’s not really a fantasy of mine anyway.  I mean I’d TAKE a nappy change from her but that’s because I’m inherently lazy.  If somebody else wants to do it for me, have at it I say.

I could foresee some point after keeling over, between her 000 emergency call and the arrival of the ambulance, perhaps as a white shining light hovered near the ceiling with the siren song of dead relatives gently calling me towards it, I’d feel the soft tender caress of my beloved ripping off my nappy if only spare her any embarrassment when the paramedics arrived.

Of course if this nappy removal progressed to her deploying wipes, powders and a fluffy fresh dry one being put in place I’d also know for sure that I’d started hallucinating and in real life I was in fact in a hypoxic death spiral.

And before anybody posts any “in memorial” responses on the occasion of my demise (oh the presumptions), I got better.

[Little Sherri]

2 hours ago, oznl said:

“I really don’t need this right now” she sighed. 

I sighed, reading this, as well. My beloved suffers a few chronic ailments, most in the not-too-serious category, things like migraines and unpredictably inflamed joints that can be deeply inconvenient but that rarely benefit from urgent medical intervention. You take the pills, you go lie down, you wait it out. When these episodes arise, there is an expectation that my sympathies will run to depths measured in fathoms. Which I don't usually struggle too much with - hey, pain sucks - unless I feel like I'm being manipulated. ("I really have no interest in Carl & Doreen's landscaping grand reveal party... oh my, I can feel a crippling migraine coming on. Oh, you're not going, either? Want to go out for dinner?") 

I almost never go see my doctor for anything, and I manage most issues with an off-the-shelf civilian-grade pain medication, and/or ethanol. But I have been beset by a couple of "this could be life threatening" conditions - I have a running joke with my primary care physician that whenever I do go see him, every seven to ten years, he inevitably sends me to the ER for that thing I finally decided I should have him look at. 

When those circumstances arise, I get a "I did not sign up for THIS" vibe from my wife, implying that I'd better get off my ass and back to work, or, go completely in the other direction, so that the life insurance pays out - I'm of no use to her at 50% of my capabilities.

I don't know how she'd manage the nappy situation, were I to land up in hospital without having time to pack a bag and think it out, first. There is a passive-aggressive streak in her that has me picturing waking up to a stack of "Bella the Winged Pony" diapers on a table, sitting next to the flowers and balloons well-wishers had left for me while I was in the coma. 

[Stroller]

19 hours ago, oznl said:

For many years I’ve had a pre-existing health condition.  It’s not major (now, thanks to a whole bunch of surgeries) but very occasionally, I experience bouts of a cardiac issue.

Hmm.  I'm going for cardiac tests on Tuesday.  Probably nothing, but there have been a few worrying symptoms. If I need to be admitted to hospital at some point in the future I'm pretty confident that Mummy will bring in the nappy supplies periodically though.  Betterdry rather than Astronauts I hope...  Good luck with it oznl.

[NoIllDL]

@oznl, I find your interactions and relationship with your wife endlessly fascinating. 

Do you believe your beloved wife would feel similarly if you had had a medical "situation" that resulted in incontinence and therefore a need for nappies?  Or, is it simply the fact that you have become somewhat nappy-dependent of your own volition?   How has she taken to your epilated nether regions?  If she detests the idea (and reality) of you in nappies, I cannot think how she would approve of hair removal.  I can only imagine the underlying tension that must exist on a day-to-day basis in your household.

Next time you're in the US, look me up; while my wife may not be thrilled with my choice of undergarment, she does empathize with my personal history and psychological needs, and has never made me feel bad because of it.  Plus, she might want to meet another one of "us" to make sure she's not having to deal with the only person on the planet like me!