Hey everybody! I've been lurking and following and reading for a few weeks now and I figured I might as well formally introduce myself. My name is Jason Kasper and I go by the nick of vanRijn most places online. My website is http://movingparts.net in case anyone is interested. Based on my reading and research, I'm probably an atypical hammock user.
I'm married and have 3 kiddos. By day, I'm a 42-year-old computer programmer for VMware, working on the VMware Fusion team. By night, I'm a 20-year-old kid who still stays up way too late playing Street Fighter and hacking on random bits of computer code.
I grew up in San Diego, CA, and then moved to Harrisburg, PA, and then Douglas, MA. Though we live in the middle of a forest in MA, and though we have 2 acres of land with lots of trees, and though I have always loved camping growing up, I don't go outside too much nowadays. We have horrible mosquitos, wasps, yellow jackets, and biting flies of all sizes. In general, going outside during the hot and humid summer is no longer something I enjoy, thanks to the great state of Massachusetts.
I have been struggling with horrible and seemingly constant neck and back pain through my career as a software engineer, and have not yet found anything that helps. A friend of mine, and fellow software engineer, tweeted a while ago about how he was working from his ENO SingleNest hammock. So I did a little research and bought an ENO DoubleNest hammock off Amazon.
I originally bought a small (9' long or so) hammock stand for $100 so I could hang indoors, but quickly became unhappy with it because it basically takes up an entire room and is horribly awkward. So I did some more research and used the hammock hang calculator and a pair of ENO indoor hammock brackets from REI and have been sleeping from my DoubleNest in my bedroom for the past week or so. And it's been a lot of fun and a lot of learning and I love it. My plan is to put indoor hammock hooks in several rooms throughout the house so I can hang a hammock from them, wherever and whenever I feel like. This is all pending wife approval, of course, but I'm hopeful.
The very first thing I learned about was this magical stuff called Amsteel Blue! And I thought paracord was cool! I bought 40 feet of 1/8" Amsteel Blue from an online place and made my own adjustable structural ridgeline and 2 whoopie slings from it. I wish I would have known about this stuff from the start and not spent the $30 or so on the ENO Atlas Straps, but live and learn I guess. The next thing I need to find is polyester tree straps so I can have everything I need all self-contained in my ENO DN bag.
The next thing I learned was that even though I live in MA and it's ridiculously hot and humid during the summer here, I need some kind of an underquilt. This surprised me greatly. Actually, what surprised me greatly was that I woke up at 3:30 in the morning, in a 70-degree room, and yet I was shivering and shaking almost uncontrollably from being so cold. Probably the portable A/C unit and the ceiling fan helped with this. I've ordered a Rothco poncho liner and I'll be making it into an underquilt, but I'm temporarily using a regular blanket as an underquilt and it works remarkably well. I think I might try just a folded-over sheet to see if that works before mutilating the poncho liner.
The next thing I've learned in my first week of indoor-hammock-sleeping is that my neck and back feel GREAT! Before trying hammock-sleeping, just about every day I would wake up with my neck and back in pain. But this last week, I've woken up feeling refreshed and feeling no neck or back pain. I'm hoping it's not just my brain convincing myself that I've finally found The Secret, but I'm going to keep with the indoor-hammock-sleeping in hopes that I'm onto something. And based on what I've read from others on these forums, it sounds like I'm not alone in feeling this way.
Anyway, I apologize for the lengthy intro/diatribe, but I am so excited to have found this forum and discovered indoor hammocking! I have always loved hammocks, but it was a love/hate relationship because the only ones I'd ever seen growing up were the horrible rope/spreader/American hammocks. I am so happy to have discovered what real hammocking is about. I'm just getting started and I'm still learning, but I'm having a whole lot of fun in the process.
Should anyone actually make it this far down in my post, I'll just sum this up by saying thanks to everybody on these forums and I wish you all the best today and I'm excited to have found you all.
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