1:39 p.m. - January 19, 2006
Well Rested and Ready. Well, Relatively So.
So this is what it feels like to be well rested??
Amazing.
Sleep, glorious, sleep occurred last night without interruptions from either child, hacking spouses, or my own personal maladies.
I even eschewed my normal semi-late night internet surfing in order to get more shut-eye.
For the past few days, I�ve been fighting this gunk that�s been going around. I haven�t been hacking up a lung, but I�ve been stuffy and a bit dizzy (my head was spinning, like a whirlpool it never ends, and it�s you that�s making it spin�) and general bleah. On top of that, Katie has been wandering into our room at odd hours because she�s too hot / too cold / had a bad dream / needs a hug / needs an animal / needs to go potty / is just awake.
Not even Ny-Quil can stop a 4-year old from waking you up if she so desires.
Last night, though, was a dream, as it were. Liz had a meeting to attend, so I was the designated kid-wrangler. Katie went to bed without a hitch (well, that�s relative, but still it was fairly hitch-free) and Kristin, who is also fighting the creeping crud, conked out at about 8:15 or so.
I then reached for a can of suds and started to watch a couple of episodes from the Sopranos, season two, that I had TiVod. (Oh, I love the deliciously evil Richie Aprile � more on the Sopranos will follow in later days).
Liz was home in time to catch the Bevilacqua kid get whacked (you sure you want diet?), and I decided then to head upstairs. I was still nursing my can o� brew (I really needed a nipple on that can) and by 10:15 or so I had declared that peace was in our time, and I needed to hit the hay.
And I didn�t wake up until past 7:00.
Sleep and I have been friends and enemies for a long time. I do enjoy a good night�s sleep, and normally don�t have any trouble falling to sleep.
I used to have no problem at ALL falling asleep.
When Moose and I were roomies, we each had a stereo (almost identical) and he had an extra set of speakers. So we rigged it that we had a stereo upstairs and each had speakers in the room.
At night, I�d fall asleep listening to music, and it wasn�t gentle lullabies, nor Bread, nor anything like that. It was the normal alterna-rock of all shapes and sounds that we listened to.
I scrambled his brain the night that I went to sleep at 10:00, just having finished a can of Dr. Pepper and I put a Prong CD on the stereo. I was asleep by the second song.
�Caffeine and thrash metal � and you�re still went to sleep like THAT???�
�Hey, I needed the rest!�
As time went on, there have been occasions where I haven�t been able to sleep when I wanted to, mostly due to stress and / or children. Of course, when you have really little ones, the sleep comes when it comes, and your ears are always on red alert for their plaintive wails in the night.
But now that Kristin is old enough to self-soothe, that�s in the past. Knock on wood, plastic, Formica, and any other natural or man-made material that I have on hand.
Once in a while I�ll wake up for some reason, and usually, I�m toast then. If it�s past 2:30 or 3:00 I�m not getting back to sleep for a couple of hours. I usually know after about 15 minutes if I�ve hit the sleep wall, so I check online, then head downstairs and start flipping through the TiVo looking for something to kill the time, then I�ll probably fall asleep on the couch.
Those episodes always seem to happen when I have a busy day, so I�m totally dragging the next day.
Then there are the days where I resist sleep, for whatever reason. The internet is a big cause for this at times, because I get lost in doing things there and all of a sudden, it�s way past midnight. Oops.
The worst is when you do that, finally get into bed, then one of the kids wakes up about 10 minutes after and the spouse goes, �Can you see about what she wants??�
O, the fates are cruel at times.
But I can�t blame the internet � in the past I�d get caught up in a book, or a movie, or something and then it�d be o�dark thirty and I need to get up soon to go to work.
Sometimes, when I stay up late, I break out the power nap right after work. Once in a while, in the winter, it�s creepy, because when you wake up at 6:00 after a short-ish nap and it�s totally dark.
It�s creepy, because it feels like it�s late at night and you missed a whole bunch of stuff.
I like naps, especially lazy ones where you just kind of drift off and slowly drift back to the realm of the living.
However, many times, when I wake up from a nap, it�s not always by choice, and for about 45 minutes I feel groggy and disjointed and worse off than before I had the nap. It seems like my head is on sideways and backwards and I have no concept of this temporal plane. And you ask yourself, �Was that nap really worth it??�
Sadly, sometimes the answer is no. And that�s a wasted nap � a blot upon your history.
Normally I get by on six to seven hours a sleep with no problems at all. But there are days, like today, where I had a good 8 � hours and I needed every last drop of sleep.
But now it�s after lunch and I do feel that I could use a nap.
Damn General Tso�s � I even cut down my portions in an effort to get thin.
Does MSG cause drowsiness?
