Resting Comfortably Here at Home

First off, allow me to say that my Mom is the best Mom ever!

As some of you may remember, I've occasionally made reference to the fact that most times I wake up stiff, sore, achy and like I spent most of the night tossing and turning rather than actually sleeping.  I blame that solidly on my rather solid mattress but I've been rather hesitant to spend the money to go out and get a new one as, let's face it, the darned things are expensive and what happens if you get one home and find out that you aren't sleeping any better on it than you were the old one you just replaced?  T'was a conundrum so I simply continued to flip the mattress and hope for the best ... yea, like I was going to one day miraculously wake up without being stiff, sore, and groggy!

My Mom listened to all of my laments and after probably hearing more than enough, she decided that she was going to do something about it in the form of an early birthday present which has turned out to be absolutely, positively wonderful and apparently just what my achy back needed!  Having bought one for my brother who also has back issues in the past, my Mom went to the local Kohl's and purchased a Home Classics® Dual Layer 4-in. Mattress Topper that makes the claim:

"Experience the comfort of this Home Classics mattress topper. Dual-layer technology features two inches of fluffy fiberfill, followed by two inches of premium memory foam. The dreamlike design relieves pressure points and reduces tossing and turning for the utmost in relaxation."

To say that the "high-density, two-inch thick memory foam contours to the shape of your body, offering personalized, therapeutic support" while the "two-inch thick microfiber fill adds a second layer of luxurious softness" is not just the truth, it's an understatement as for the last few nights I have slept better at home than I have in a very, very long time!

As I settled into the cloud-like comfort of my bed last night after working a 16-hour overtime shift in dispatch, I was reminded of the wonderful beds at the Inn Victoria in Chester, Vermont and the Captain Lord Mansion in Kennenbunkport, Maine. Now if I could just open my bedroom door and find a gourmet breakfast with fresh juice, delectable baked goods, and deliciously hot coffee waiting for me I could almost fool myself into thinking that I was on vacation!

Amanda (who is quite jealous and probably can't wait for me to go somewhere overnight so she can sneak a sleep herself) now refers to my bed as practically being in the clouds as though it was pretty high before, it's now a lot higher with the addition of the 4" topper and the new fluffy mattress pad that I got to go over it. I don't quite need a stool to climb in but it's close and as far as climbing out ... well ... before I was lucky if I could comfortably sleep for six hours at a time and now ... well, now I don't want to get out of bed at all it's so comfortable!

Thank you very much, Mom - truly it's the best birthday present EVAH!

Speaking of presents, while out with my friend Rhonda the other day I found a great deal on a window perch for Tesla - something I had been wanting to get him for awhile as, like most cats, he quite likes sitting in the windowsill.  After bringing it home and having Amanda assemble it, I put it in the window and waited for Tesla to notice it.  He eventually did but he pretty much wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. I was beginning to think I had wasted my money but lo and behold, he apparently has realized that it's a very comfortable alternative to perching on the hard sill and makes a great place for a nap in the sun ...

Thankfully we've had a break from the nasty hot and humid weather that August had been blessing us with so we're able to have the windows open and the air-conditioning off and Tesla has now decided that his new window perch is actually quite nice - even when someone is disturbing his nap by taking pictures!

I wonder if Tesla could talk if he'd tell me that was his best present ever? It would be nice to think so!

Did Anyone Get the License Plate ...

...  of the the truck that hit me?  Whoa.  I cannot for the life of me seem to get going this morning.  I can't remember how many times I woke up just enough to tell myself "It's time you got out of bed" before rolling over and falling right back asleep but I can assure it was definitely more than one or two.  I finally managed to swing my legs over the side of the bed and force myself into an upright position at 10:36 but even after shuffling off to the Keurig machine and brewing up a nice hot cup of coffee, I'm still doing a zombie impression that would make Amanda proud!

I'm going to blame it on the recent change to Daylight Savings Time as no matter what my clock might say, physically I still know that it's an hour earlier than that. With a 16-hour shift ahead of me on Sunday, I set my clocks ahead to 10:00 and went to bed to do some reading early for me on Saturday night figuring I'd be able to adjust to the lost hour by going to sleep a bit earlier than I usually do but when I got up at 5:30 Sunday morning of course the very first thing I thought was "But it's really 4:30!" so there was no fooling myself into thinking that hour hadn't disappeared.  All day I felt more tired than usual and today - well - let me just say it was a good thing I had the opportunity to sleep in as I obviously needed it!

I've yet to figure out why we as a nation even do Daylight Savings Time anymore. The old reasons of the farmers needing more light is rather defunct and as far as it saving energy, I'd be interested to see if in fact it did.  More than anything I think it produces a nation of zombies for a week or so afterward while everyone tries to get their internal clocks to adjust and their sleep schedules back on schedule.  Not that I have the greatest sleep schedule in the world, mind you, but if I lived in either Arizona or Hawaii I wouldn't have to mess with it at all as they don't participate in the falling back and springing forward that the rest of us do.  Maybe they're on to something?

And on a final totally unrelated note, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to those who have been voting in the My Connecticut Story contest that I'm participating in.  Through your help my story has made its way to the number one spot - woohoo!  The trick now is going to be keeping it there so if you're registered already, don't forget you can vote once each 24-hour period up until the contest ends on May 25th - which is a darned long way out and an awfully long time to run a contest.  Anyhow, if you've not voted yet but want to it's a bit of a process to register but once you have, you simply have to log in each time you return to vote again.  Click on the link above if you'd like to help a blogger out!

Meanwhile, I'm going to shuffle off to get another cup of coffee or two ...

I've Got a Question - You've Got an Answer

I remember reading somewhere once that as a person gets older one requires less sleep. Now I'm not sure if this is because as one gets older, one gets closer to that big final "dirt nap" and one hates to waste any of the waking moments one has left on earth but personally, I'm not buying it. Not lately anyway!

This week I am remembering exactly how awful it is to be sleep-deprived as I've really been cutting myself short in the sleep department. Between the hours I've put in at work, the fact that I've got a world famous British blogger visiting my house this week and it's way too easy to stay up late talking to her, and really messing up my sleep by going out to celebrate my birthday and staying out way past my bedtime before I had to go in to work a 16-hour shift I have done a bang-up job of wearing myself out!

Today sn't going to see too much time for rest either as I need to make final preparations for my upcoming vacation which starts tomorrow and I've yet to do a single bit of packing or even really given much thought to what all I need to bring to the beach house (which is located in Rhode Island and unfortunately not one of those lovely St. Martin villa rentals). I do know that I need to pack that huge bottle of vodka I've had in the cupboard for ages that Mags needs to use to make vodka penne ...

Anyhow, all that aside, the question for this post came to me Wednesday sometime during that long, long, long sixteen-hour shift at work wishing I had a couple of toothpicks to prop my eyelids open and wondering why on earth the clock seemed to be moving so slowly ...

How much sleep do you get per night? Do you think it's enough? Not enough?

While you answer that, I'm going to go get started on the myriad mass of things I have to tend to ... or not!

Starting My Day Off With a Bang!

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Yay! It's my day off! You'll notice I said "day" off as in singular and not "days" off as in plural. Unfortunately, due to my having to call out sick the other day, I really needed to pick up an extra day this week to make up for the loss in revenue (and points) so I'm fortunate that another dispatcher is on vacation this week and I'm covering for his day shift tomorrow.

I don't mind working on Saturdays all that much as the pace usually isn't as bad as during the week and with less people in the room - heck, in the whole building! - things are a bit more relaxed. The downside is that with fewer people on the road, when it hits the fan, it really really hits the fan! Oh well, such is the nature of the beast!

Old person that I am becoming, one of the best things about a day off, in my opinion, is that I get to sleep in a little and am not a slave to the blasted alarm clock. Every morning when I wake up my first thought other than "groan, is it time to get up already?" is "how many more days until I can sleep in?". Today was a sleep in day.

Or, it should have been if I hadn't had my bedroom window open. My bedroom is in the front of the house which obviously faces the street and directly across from my house two of my neighbors park their boats. The neighbors are both nice enough guys and quite friendly once I got rid of my ex-husband who had a nasty habit of getting on the neighbors' wrong sides - imagine that! - but being avid fishermen that means they like to get up early and go out to catch 'em while they're still biting. Sometimes this means getting their boats ready to go way too early in the morning and sometimes that involves a little bit of noise.

So, as I'm slumbering blissfully away this morning having the strangest dream about being asked by Gerard Way to help him design his new house (what the heck did I have to eat before I went to bed last night??), I am suddenly jarred awake by a loud clanging noise directly outside my bedroom window. God's nightshirt, what in the blue hell was that?? I immediately jump out of bed and look out the window where I see my neighbor has removed some unwieldy object from his van rack and unceremoniously dropped it on the pavement next to his boat. Well, thank God that's all it was as it had almost sounded like the entire Union Army had marched up the road and set up "The Dictator" directly across from my house!

Just as a bit of history for those not familiar with this particular piece of Civil War artillery, this 13-inch seacoast mortar weighed over 17,000 pounds and was intended for siege and fortifications and not field work. This particular monster, forged at the Fort Pitt Foundry in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1862, was made portable during the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia by being mounted on a railroad car which was specially strengthened with extra beams and iron rods to withstand the strain of firing. Since this mortar threw a 218 pound shell about two and one-half miles with a charge of 20 pounds of powder, the strain was obviously considerable.

Needless to say, if it had arrived across the street from my house, it would have involved considerable noise and fanfare! Of course my neighbors aren't that noisy and, yes, I am way exaggerating but at the time, that's almost what it sounded like! And it certainly ended my dream and sleeping-in time.

Oh well, time to quit fooling around and get on with the day. The sad thing is, now I'll never know whether I got to redesign Gerard's house or not! How did your day start out??

Things that make you go "hmm" but certainly not "zzz"!

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As I've been having some trouble sleeping lately to the point of feeling like I am tossing and turning all night long, I mentioned it at my last doctor's visit and Dr. Joe was nice enough to give me a prescription for Ambien. Actually, he gave me a prescription for something else first but because I have really lousy medical insurance, there was a $40 co-pay to get it so I got him to give me a script for Ambien instead, which only has a $10 co-pay because there is a generic medication for it. I need to sleep but the girls also need to eat so a $40 medication is a luxury that I can't afford!

I've never taken any sort of sleep aid before so I wasn't sure how Ambien was going to affect me. A couple people at work who take it said to make sure that I had at least 8 hours before I needed to get up and also that it kicked in within about 20 minutes. The instructions that came along with it said basically the same thing so last Friday I took one as I didn't have to work in the morning and it seemed like the perfect time to "test sleep" it.

I took the very tiny blue pill with some water, settled back into bed, and waited for blissful sleep to overtake me. An hour later I was still waiting. An hour after that I looked at the clock and thought that it was a darned good thing I didn't have to get up in the morning. Sometime after that I finally drifted off but it was that kind of sleep where you always feel like you're partially awake. I swear I woke up every five minutes and when I awoke in the morning I sure the heck didn't feel like I had gotten any sort of restful slumber. So much for Ambien.

However, I had paid $10 American for this medication and I wasn't willing to just toss it away after one failed attempt. Not having to get up for work this past Friday morning, I figured I would try it again Thursday night but this time I was going to double the dose as the label on the prescription bottle read "one or two pills as needed". Obviously I needed two as one didn't work at all so this time I took two tiny little blue pills with some water, settled back into bed, and waited for blissful sleep. And waited. And waited.

At least this time when I finally did get to sleep, close to 45 minutes later as best I can guess based on when I last looked at the clock, I actually seemed to sleep pretty good and don't remember waking up at all during the night. I had gone to bed close to 12:30 (I was catching up on episodes of The Closer I had on the DVR) and it was almost 1:30 before I fell asleep. I had expected to sleep until close to 9:00 but I woke up at 7:00 instead. Ugh ... It was pretty easy to convince myself to stay in bed, though, so I rolled over and didn't wake up again until the preferred 9:00 that I had been shooting for in the first place.

I just don't understand why it is I seem to have such a high tolerance to medications. Everyone raves about the wonders of Vicodin and to me it's like taking a couple of extra-strength Tylenol; Percocet simply makes me sick to my stomach; Tylox does virtually zip for me; and now a sleeping medication that other people can take and find themselves happily snoozing away in Dreamland 20 minutes later is so ineffective that I can write this entire post after taking it.

Somehow this just doesn't seem fair ...

Of sleep and dreams

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Between my work schedule, an upcoming pleasant evening out with Paula, the girls, & Captain Jack Sparrow, and my all-consuming obsession with being able to get through "Free Bird" on Guitar Hero II I didn't have a lot of time to come up with what one might call a "really good post" for today. Hence I have resorted to a Blogthings Quiz to help fill in the gaps!

You Sometimes Don't Get Enough Sleep

You're often more tired than you'd like, and you're probably not getting enough quality sleep. Sleeping a little more could make you a lot more energetic and happy. Try having a bedtime, keep your bedroom cool, and only eat fruit before bed.

Do You Get Enough Sleep?

Somehow I don't think I needed an Internet Quiz to figure this one out but, like I said, was looking for some quick fill today!

I know for a fact that I don't get enough sleep but it's not necessarily from a lack of trying on my end. I just flat-out don't sleep well these days and am quite sure I wake up at least a dozen or more times during the night. Every great once in awhile I will wake up in the morning and think - wow! I slept pretty good! - but that doesn't seem to happen too often. More often than not I wake up in the morning and groan while glaring at the alarm clock and wondering how many more days it is until I can sleep in!

I could've sworn I heard or read somewhere that the older you get the less sleep you need but I have yet to see that work in actual life. Maybe I'm just not old enough to need less sleep yet? Is that something that doesn't really take effect until you're 50? Or 60? Or even 70?

It probably doesn't help that I have been having some really, really strange dreams lately - the kind of dreams where you wake up and think "whatever I ate before I went to bed, I gotta remember not to have it again!" Not that I can clearly remember them as the day goes by but that's probably for the best!

Oh well, perhaps tonight I'll have some swashbuckling dreams involving Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom (yay!)


Though, with my luck, they will more likely involve Davy Jones (eww!).

What about you? Anyone have any interesting dreams they want to share?

Newton's Laws of Motion As They Relate to Getting Up in the Mornings!

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I'm not the Science expert in my household - Amanda is much better at it then I ever could hope to be as she is, after all, taking Honors Science at NFA and doing quite well with it. As a matter of fact, I simply took the requisite science courses I needed in school and that was it. Lately, though, I've been giving some thought to a few things of a scientific nature.

These thoughts mostly occur to me when I've swatted the 'snooze' button on the alarm several times and am trying to talk myself into getting out of bed before I'm late for work. In particular, I have been thinking about Newton's "Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis", or Laws of Motion. Newton's First Law of Motion, the Law of Inertia, states that:

"Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it."

The key point here is that if there is no force acting on an object, or if all the external forces cancel each other out, then the object will maintain a constant velocity (speed of motion). If that velocity is zero, then the object remains at rest. Translated that means that if I simply hit the 'snooze' alarm every nine minutes and make no effort to swing my feet over the side of the bed and propel myself in the general direction of the bedroom door, I am not going anywhere! In other words, objects at rest tend to remain at rest!

Once I finally do swing my feet over the side of the bed and start towards the door, I should be able to continue that forward momentum unless there is a force applied in the opposite direction to slow me down. I think what that means is that if I turn around and look at the warm, cozy bed that I just left it could compel me to move backwards and I could find myself climbing back into bed and once again becoming an "object at rest". I believe this is what Newton meant but, again, I am not the scientific one in the family!

After I've actually managed to accelerate myself out of bed, which generally occurs after much mental cajoling, Newton's Second Law of Motion, the Law of Dynamics, comes into play:

"The acceleration of an object of constant mass is proportional to the force acting upon it."

This law concerns force and what causes objects to move and involves a lot of Calculus, another subject that I am not well versed in! Acceleration is the changing velocity of an object when a force is applied to it. According to Newton's Second Law, for an object (me) with a constant mass (weight) to be accelerated requires an external force be applied for the velocity to change. This is the scientific equation of F=m*a or a = F/m.

I believe what this means in relation to my getting out of bed and staying out of bed, is that the smell of freshly brewing coffee (a force) will get me (the object) to move more quickly (velocity) away from the bed. Scientifically speaking, it would be helpful for me to set the automatic coffee maker at night to start brewing coffee at about the same time the alarm clock is set to go off so that the smell of the coffee will help propel me away from the bed once I've managed to climb out of the thing and started heading towards the door.

Which then brings me to Newton's Third Law of Motion, the Law of Reciprocal Actions or the Action-Reaction Law:

"Whenever one body exerts force upon a second body, the second body exerts an equal and opposite force upon the first body."

Now I haven't quite got this one figured out as to how it relates to my being able to get out the door in order to get to work on time but what I think it might mean is that the caffeine reacts on my state of wakefulness and my state of wakefulness in turn pushes me out the door in the general direction of work. In other words, the caffeine acts and my body reacts. At least that's the closest I can come to figuring all of this out!

So who says you don't use Science in real life? I use it every single morning when I have the great debate with myself on how long I can prolong the inevitable process of getting up and going to work! My high school Science teacher would be so proud - and yet - so disappointed! Perhaps I should leave the Science to Amanda?

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." ~ Edgar Allen Poe

Speaking of dreams, I've been having some downright strange ones lately. Granted, I never have what one might call "normal" dreams to begin with - things always seem abstract and out of sync (rather like my MP3 player was earlier this evening!) but lately they've been even stranger than usual and I seem to wake up flat-out exhausted from all of the nocturnal adventures I've been having.

Of course I'm not smart enough to write these things down as soon as I wake up so I don't lose them completely and I can only remember bits and pieces here and there but I know that lately they seem to have an awful lot to do with dispatching. I'm thinking this probably translates out to the fact that I work too much and it's been extrememly busy in the Land of Commerical Ambulance Service the past week or so. When I go to bed and try to send crews on calls when I am not anywhere near either a radio console or computer then I know I'm in trouble! I actually have to wake up and tell myself that I am not at work, someone else is, and let it go.

This isn't the first job where I've done that sort of thing. I repaired ground-to-air radio communication systems in my sleep when I was in the Air Force, attempted to keep up with a very busy fast-food line in dreams when I briefly worked at Burger King, and sat up in the middle of the night trying to figure out where to plug in my headset on a non-existent console when I first started dispatching police in California.

I don't want to dream about work - I want to dream about relaxing vacations, puffy clouds floating overhead, or simply peaceful waves crashing on a shore so that I could actually wake up feeling rested and not like I'd just run back-to-back marathons while doing the New York Times crossword puzzle! And if I'm going to have action-packed dreams can't they at least take place on the deck of the Black Pearl while I exchange witty banter and smoldering looks with Captain Jack Sparrow? Can't they be something good that doesn't have anything to do with work or is that asking too much of my sub-conscious mind?

There's got to be a way to control these things, I'm just going to have to figure out how. Any thoughts? Suggestions? Ideas?