Just a Smidge: losing sleep

Showing posts with label losing sleep. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Hump Day - Repost

My wife is going away this weekend, and while I will of course miss her, I am looking forward to one very special thing. Well, yes, playoff football, but also something else. I knew I had articulated this phenomenon before, so I dug back into the archives – way back to 2019, the pre-COVID days if you can even imagine. Here’s what has me excited about this weekend:

My wife has left us. All alone. For four days.

It’s Day Two and we have already descended into chaos. Pray for me.

I try to see the bright side of situations, but this one is tough. Sure, we get to eat out a lot, but that’s expensive. Sure, we could not shower and spend all day in our underwear, but they require you to wear pants at Chick-fil-A, and will insist that you leave immediately if you aren’t. We found that out the hard way.

As near as I can tell, there is only one pure upside to my wife being gone – I get to sleep on the hump.

You see, I’m in the second half of my forties, or the “complete physical breakdown” period, as it’s known. Some random part of my body is either hurting, aching, or simply not working correctly at any given moment of every single day. The only thing keeping me alive and marginally mobile is sleep.

A good night’s sleep depends on four main factors:

1) Making sure your kids are sleeping somewhere other than in your house.

2) Making sure your dog is sleeping somewhere other than in your house.

3) Having demonstrated the willingness to shoot randomly out of your upstairs windows at the first sign of late-night disturbances, thus eliminating loud parties and street racing in your neighborhood.

4) A good bed.

Of these four essential ingredients, a good bed is arguably the most important factor for an aging male, such as myself, since I’m mostly deaf at this point anyway. But having a good bed is not as foolproof as it sounds. At least not for me and my wife.

We have two main problems when shopping for a bed, stemming mostly from the fact that we’re both “frugal”:

A) Neither of us want to pay the Maserati-ish ticket price for the “premium-grade” mattress, even though we both need the premium-grade mattress.

B) Neither of us want to buy a new mattress after the recommended seven to ten years, because even after fifteen years, “we just bought this one!”

So there, in the master suite, sits a probably ten-plus-year-old “standard entry-grade” king-size mattress that has only one thing going for it – the hump in the middle.

By sleeping on our respective sides all these years, the weight and heat of our bodies have worked to shift many of the standard entry-grade mattress molecules to the middle of the bed. There, due again to the effects of pressure and heat, much like how diamonds are created deep within our earth’s crust, the sub-par mattress molecules have fused together into a magical longitudinal mass of premium mattress molecules, known as “the hump.”

The hump is a mattress within a mattress, if you will. It’s a three-foot-wide section of platinum mattress, hiding in plain sight in the middle of our old, worn out bronze model.

The hump is not available to me on regular nights, because if I tried to sleep there, I would be touching my wife while we slept, which would throw her delicate nighttime temperature regulation system completely out of whack, activating her “kick violently until the temperature regulation system gets back on track” reflex, which puts me in great nighttime physical peril.

So, the hump is only available when the king-size bed is single-occupancy, and this week, that single occupant is me.

When I woke up this morning, my hip didn’t even hurt. I feel like I’m forty-three again!

Happy hump day.

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, May 10, 2023

We Have an Alarming Problem

We have an alarm clock problem. The main problem is I still like my alarm clock. I don’t want to have my phone plugged in and charging right next to my head all night. I want it in another room where it can’t bother me. I purposely don’t call or text people in the middle of the night, and I don’t want to know if they call or text me.

Also, when I want to know what time it is in the middle of the night, I just want to roll over and look. I don’t want to have to pick anything up and make it shine in my face.

Also, one of my favorite things in the world is waking up and thinking my alarm is about to go off, then rolling over to look at the time, only to gleefully discover that it’s still the middle of the night and I get to sleep for four more hours. That moment of joy somehow wouldn’t be the same if I had to extend my arm out from under the cozy covers and pick up my phone.

None of this would be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that my current alarm clock is failing. It’s failing in a really weird way, though. It still tells the time perfectly well, and it has never failed to wake me when I’ve asked it to. The problem is it wakes me - or more to the point, it wakes my wife - when I haven’t asked it to.

In addition to my alarm schedule, it seems to have one of its own.

It has a switch to turn the alarm on and off. In the “on” setting you can choose between a beep, or the radio. The switch even has an indicator light on the display, confirming your desire to have an alarm or not. The clock doesn’t seem too concerned about the status of that switch anymore.

As an example, this past Sunday was a sleep-in morning, so I had chosen “no alarm” with the now, apparently, meaningless switch. The clock had other plans, and fired up a Spanish radio show at 5:30 am, but then kindly shut itself off almost immediately. It’s often considerate like that.

It fired up a second unasked-for and unappreciated alarm at 6:00 am, and that time I had to shut the beeping off myself.

At least my rogue alarm clock tries to keep it fun, though. In addition to random Hispanic talk shows, it occasionally decides to do a completely different alarm noise. Instead of the standard beep, beep, beep sound, it does some funky electronic celebration song, like those ancient hand-held video games made when you scored a touchdown.

That’s not an advertised feature of the clock, and there does not seem to be any switch or setting where I could choose the Mattel football fight song. It just happens every once in a while in place of the regular beep, as if to say, “Hey, it’s time to wake up, champ. Go out there and be your best self. Score a metaphorical touchdown today, winner!”

Here’s the thing: none of this bothers me enough yet to get rid of it. I think the weird celebration song is fun, and I have been blessed with the ability to fall right back to sleep if it’s not time to get up. My wife, however, was not blessed with that ability.

She does not like my alarm clock. At all.

I tried to replace it. I really did! No one makes good alarm clocks anymore. The display on mine is green, and it’s just the right amount of non-intrusive brightness. I tried one with red numbers and one with white, and they both lit up the room like a desk lamp. I think the red one was actually giving us a tan.

I would steal my wife’s alarm clock on her side of the bed, because she uses her phone now like the rest of the world, but her clock absolutely sucks at being a clock. It gains at least a minute about every two days. Left unchecked, I would be getting up an hour earlier than I wanted to within a month.

My wife has made countless pleas for me to get rid of it, along with more than a few threats on my life immediately after unscheduled alarm incidents. I’m going to have to give in sooner or later, for the sake of my marriage and health, but I think the clock just bought me a little more time, so to speak.

Our power was out overnight a few days ago, so I was forced to have my phone by my bed. My alarm clock was completely off. No display, no nothing. But wouldn’t you know it, at exactly 5:30 am, that bad boy sounded a steady beep, beep ,beep to wake me up.

No lights, no display, no power anywhere in the house, but by God, that wasn’t going to stop it from doing its job.

It may be crazy, random, broken, and possibly possessed, but it’s still strangely and incredibly reliable. How can you abandon a trusted friend like that?

I mean, I really wanted to get up at 6:00, but still…

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, February 10, 2021

There's a Problem with Facebook

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today to report on a potentially serious problem I discovered last night. No, not that I’m so old I can hurt myself by sleeping wrong. I already knew about that problem. I’m talking about Facebook. I think it might have a huge glitch.

I got into bed last night, and as usual, said my prayers for an injury-free night of sleep. I was just about to close my eyes when I noticed the blue glow of a computer screen coming from my office down the hall. Realizing I had forgotten to shut my computer down, I hauled myself out of bed and headed down the hall to turn it off.

I got back into bed forty-five minutes later.

When I got to my computer, Facebook was up on the browser. I went to shut the computer off, but Facebook made me name my rock band first by combining the color of my underwear with the last thing I ate. We are the Blue and White Nachos. I was then forced to pick between four different trays of delicious fried food. There was a crawfish and fries tray, a wings and tater tots tray, a garlic bread and mac ’n cheese tray, and a mini burgers and fries tray. It was a very difficult decision that I agonized over for a while, but ultimately I had to go with the wings and tater tots because of my love of the tot.

I was then told that my earlobes were the same distance apart as my nipples, so I had to go check that in the mirror and it was a lie. I went back to shut off the computer but I had to take an ‘80s movie challenge first. The question was simply how many of the twenty movies listed had I seen, but the average score was shown as thirty-nine percent, which was ridiculous. I murdered that score. I had seen all of them except one. I then had to email myself a reminder to finally see Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

I went back to the browser to shut off Facebook but before I could I had to watch a ten-minute animated video on how Pablo Escobar spent his billions of dollars in drug money. That was followed by a Mexican restaurant life hack video where you get a Styrofoam to-go container, but instead of taking your tacos home, you pour your margarita in there and then punch a little straw hole in the top of the lid. I was making a mental note to tell my wife about the margarita trick, and also about how Pablo Escobar had two submarines and his own zoo, but got sidetracked by some kid going absolutely crazy at a Georgia Tech welcome speech, followed by the first seven minutes of Conan O’Brien’s 2011 Dartmouth commencement address.

The rabbit hole had quite a few twists and turns from there, ultimately terminating in a video of a guy cutting a frozen bass out of an iced-over lake with a chainsaw. When he got the chunk of bass-filled ice free and pulled it out, there was a frozen pike underneath with its teeth clamped to the tail end of the bass.

At that point, as I glazed over wondering just how fast that lake actually froze over, my mouse cursor was finally able to reach all the way up to the log out button, and I was finally able to shut my computer down. I’m not even sure how it happened, but I was simply unable to get out of the Facebook program until that point. Due to this programming flaw, whatever it is, I lost almost a full hour of sleep.

I hope you’re not experiencing the same problem with your Facebook account, but being that it’s a web-based program, I suspect you might be. I really think we ought to let someone over there at Facebook HQ know about this so they can look into it.

I think they’ll be genuinely surprised at how much of our time they’re accidentally wasting!