Day 1 — 29/30 September 2008
At about 7:30 or 8 in the evening I decided to quit working for a while. (I work from home, which makes it awfully easy to put in some odd hours.) I found my bowl of leftover popcorn from the night before, turned the game on (the Pittsburgh Stealers vs. a team who tucked tail and ran their cowardly way out of Cleveland years ago and now reside in Baltimore), grabbed a book and lay on the couch. Within minutes my wife had kissed me on the forehead. “Goodnight,” she said.
“But I’m not sleeping. I’m watching TV,” I replied as the cat jumped up on my belly to curl into a ball of purr. “The game’s on.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Like you’ve ever seen the end of a game. Goodnight.” I ignored her and swept my attention back to the game. The mighty mighty Stealers were indeed pummeling the dumb ol ‘ stinky Ravens. I’m always happy when the millionaires on my team play better than the millionaires on the other team. Too bad about the Packers, though. They should have won… I really don’t care much for the Stealers, but rather I dislike the Ravens. The Packers are my team…
I realized with a start that my attention had wandered from the game. Hey, wait! Who switched the channel? Why is the news on? What? Hey, it’s 11:30! I fell asleep and didn’t even see the end of the first quarter! Aw poop.
The bowl of popcorn was still sitting on my chest, the cat curled up on my belly, the remote in my hand.
“Are you okay?” called my wife from the other room. I vaguely remember that room. I used to sleep there. It had a bed in it and everything. “Vhat’s wrong?” Her Austrian accent is always stronger when she’s drowsy. “Vy are you avake?”
“How did you know I woke up?” I asked, setting the popcorn on the coffee table.
“You quit snorink.”
“Oh.” I set the cat down next to the popcorn and rolled onto my side. “I’m okay. You go back to sleep.” I found a channel that didn’t have dire financial news or infomercials on and tried to get back to sleep.
You know, I really don’t like Hogan’s Heroes much. But what else is there? By two in the morning I’d given up trying to sleep. Reading didn’t help, nor did TV. Eventually I got up and went into the other room to check my e-mails and get some work done. At about three or so I went back to the couch. The cat jumped up beside me. We used to sleep in the bedroom, he and me, along with she. But since I started snoring a few years ago it’s either the couch or the tofu-sofa hide-a-bed fold-out couch doohicky thing in my office. I do sleep better in my office, but it’s just so easy to keep working… (Lest you get the wrong idea, my beloved Viennese bride did NOT kick me out of the bedroom. But I snore so bad she really can’t get any sleep if I’m in the same room, and I hate seeing her suffer night after night. So to the other room goes the hippie.)
I sputtered, suddenly aware that I had been asleep, but now I’m not.
“Are you okay?” called my wife from the other room…
“Yeah,” I said, “I think I was asleep.”
“You were, for yust a few minutes. You snorked like a train. Goodnight.”
I turned the TV to the news and grabbed my book. By about 4:30 I was asleep. By 6:20 I was awake. My wife’s alarm clock whanged and clanged at 6:22. I got up at 6:24 and went to check my e-mail, one eye open. Time to start another day…
Are you snoring so loud you wake yourself up? I am confused at this constant waking up, but maybe I’m just lucky to have such a tenuous hold on sleep.
The doctor tells me I have a deviant septum or some such thing; I must have broken my nose somehow about five years ago. I can’t breathe out my nose… So I snore a lot, but the bad part is that I sometimes wake up gasping for breath. Other times I just wake up for no reason. It’s rare for me to sleep more than a couple hours at a time. Before the doc will operate on my honker, though, he said he needs to do a “sleep study” to rule out apnea. So I gots to keep track of my sleep for a week, then go to the hospital and get wired up to some machine for a night — just so they can say, “oh, you must have broken your nose and it’s hard for you to breathe at night…”
Skyler has had to go through a couple of sleep studies to see if he was having seizures at night. You are supposed to sleep “normally” while being attached to a bzillion wires and having somebody monitor you constantly…
That sounds terrible. I’d just say, “Hey, my wife won’t sleep in the same room with me. How’s that for scientific research, doc?”
I am with ya! I have insomnia and it is starting to really kick my ass. I am running out of energy and may even take my life into my hands and have my son drive me on the errands because I am so shaky and loopy.
I bet it’s because I haven’t had any beer. That’s what I am going to tell LK, anyway.