I love to sleep

April 29, 2010

Favefurniturebed_tweak

Don???t most people? I would think so. But I know one person, @aaronh, who seems to have superhuman abilities to exist on subhuman amounts of sleep. Four or five hours a night for weeks on end? Come on. I???m tanked if I have two nights in a row of seven or fewer.

I know other people who keep vampire hours and don???t go to bed until the wee hours of the morning. But that???s a little different, because @someToast doesn???t seem to knock himself out getting up in the morning, so the quantity of hours is probably still there.

I, on the other hand, neither stay up late nor scrimp on hours.??

That doesn’t mean that I don’t often feel like I wished I had slept more. In reality I get seven to nine hours of sleep most nights. The exception is Thursday nights when I stay out late after bowling, whooping it up at karaoke. I get to bed between 1:00 and 2:30, depending on how much I???m singing.

But most of the time I go to bed between, say, 11:00 and 12:30 and actually get up at 8:00. Since I???ve been writing this blog, bedtime has crept later. I sit down for some quick writing and the next thing I know, what I thought I???d dash off in thirty to forty minutes has taken me an hour and a half,??????????1` (cat landing on laptop) and it???s an hour later than I had in mind. That lateness is facilitated as well, I believe, by my afternoon coffee habit, which I am seeking to get out of this week. Caffeine has a marked effect on me and even if it???s only mid-afternoon when I have some, it???s enough to keep me feeling peppy later than I should at night.

Sleeping more than is practical isn???t helped by the fact that I have a nice bed, and give myself a sleeping environment that is low on temperature and high on covers. When you???re that comfortable, can fault be found that you just want to stay there? And if you???re laying down you might as well stay asleep. Plus, for me anyway, when I???m half-sleeping in the morning because my subconscious knows that I should really get up so it doesn???t let me fall fully back to sleep, my other subconscious is going to town giving me absolutely wacky dreams. I like those dreams a lot and I treasure the experience. It???s especially fun when the dream involves people you see frequently in life and is so vivid that the next time you that person, you have to wonder for a few seconds whether that actually happened or not. Sometimes in those dreams, I even do fictional work work, such as writing It???s a Baby Armadillo, and hang out with people I???ve never met.

There???s nothing not good about sleeping. Plus, you get to snuggle with critters.

Drinkofchoice2_tweak

I suppose the time of day would determine what I would say to this. In a shootout at the OK Corral, water would probably win because it’s the most versatile and the best for me. For fun, well, you all know I love beer. But beer isn’t always practical, and I also covered it in a previous post. So for this entry, the winner is coffee.

I do coffee backwards. I drink decaffeinated in the morning and regular in the afternoon. It’s like this. I get addicted to the caffeine very quickly, so I have to be careful. If I have a couple of cups two or three days in a row, I fall victim to that awful caffeine headache if I don’t start getting my fix soon enough on subsequent days. That is why I started drinking decaf years and years ago. So that I wouldn’t get hooked on caffeine.

In the last year or two, however, regular coffee on a regular basis has crept back into my life, after lunch. It’s sort of like when I started smoking again the last time. I thought, oh, I’ll just have this one and it’ll be just fine. Next thing you know, you’re smoking close to a pack a day. Same with coffee. One afternoon when I was bored, a little sleepy, and there was already some made, I drank a cup of regular coffee. And guess what—I perked up. Maybe once a week I’d do that.

Well, now I’m drinking two or two and a half mugs an afternoon. On Saturday at home when I don’t make coffee for myself, I am visited by the splitting headache. I usually just take a few aspirin (not Excedrin, my prefered pain-reliever, because that’s got caffeine in it) and tough it out, only to start over on Monday.

I still drink decaf in the morning. My reasoning these days is that presumably I’ve just been sleeping all night and should be rested and not need artificial stimulants. I also believe that morning caffeine reels me in a day or two faster than afternoon coffee.

My name is Kelly and I am in denial.

Drinkofchoice1_tweak

Just to recap on my beers of choice, we have (L–R): Summit Extra Pale Ale, Surly Coffee Bender, Bell’s Oberon, Lagunitas India Pale Ale, Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale.