early night, very early morning

[kareina]

After finishing up yet another job application yesterday I decided that I was tired, and, just to be different, I'd go home and get to sleep early. By the time I fished doing my yoga and reading my 1000 words of geologic literature it was only 21:30. I slept deeply and peacefully, till I woke up at 0:34 sweating. Yes, it is that tie of the year again--someone has turned on the heaters in the building, and I forgot to open the door to the balcony wider than just a crack for fresh air before climbing into my loft. (Yes, I do have a small fan in the loft with me to keep the air moving, but while it helps, it isn't always enough.) I've been sleeping on a single-wide mattress since clovis_t moved to Edinburgh. When he was here I had my egg-crate foam folded in thirds lengthwise next to that mattress that came with the house, and then a few doonas spread over the top to even it out a bit to make a bed that worked for two slender people, but wasn't the world's best. But when he left I decided that I'd rather put the eggcrate foam onto the rather thin foam mattress and get a little more padding. This was quite comfortable, and I enjoyed having all that space on the loft next to the bed for storage, but it had one huge down side--when I wake up over-heated there is no cold side of the bed to scoot over into and drift straight back to sleep.

Therefore I got up and did something about it. I've been thinking about what to do for packing, and where to keep packed boxes, and had finally decided that if I pull the couch forward about a meter there should be room to stack boxes behind it, and still get into the closet next to the loft (which, fortunately, has a door on the left, and a wall that doesn't open on the right, so I can stack boxes right up to that wall without interfering with access to the closet. When I woke up too hot it suddenly occurred to me that I have another option for bedding. I can take the double mattress off of the couch (which is a futon frame), and put the single mattress on the couch, with the egg crate foam on the back of the couch. I tend to only use the couch to lay down to read, or sit up/forward for working on sewing projects anyway, and it isn't likely that I will have much in the way of visitors in my last 1.5 months in town.

Therefore I made it so. Pulled out the couch (swept away months worth of dust that had accumulated back there since last it was moved), lifted down the 8 boxes of clovis_t's books from the loft (where they'd been doing duty as a stand for my stuffed animals and the little fan), and put them behind the couch (which has also moved a bit to the right, leaving a path to the side of it for bringing boxes in and out of the storage area. Yes, that does block access to the second half of the door to the balcony, but I can cope with being able to reach only one of the doors--it is plenty wide enough for me to walk through when I need to. Then I wrestled the old bedding down, and the new bedding up and put everything back together.

I *love* re-arranging furniture and cleaning and organizing things!

I then crawled happily into my new, much wider bed at 02:55, and drifted back towards sleep again. After about 30 minutes I realized that I wasn't going to actually cross that line into true sleep, so I got back up and came back across the street, where I have done useful things like catch up on the posts to LJ and Facebook that happened in the 7 hours I'd been away, and posted a geoblog on the topic of moving and not having control over where/when. Now it is 05:00 and I should probably go get one more nap; I fear I'm not quite rested enough to do productive uni work...

Comments

[hunrvogt.livejournal.com]

So my guilty pleasure is watching "America's Top Model"... Currently Tyra and the girls are in Milan. It's very entertaining to watch the girls in cozy living spaces or taking two hours to get to a go see and back. Only to have you write posts with similar information about living in the town. It's like my own, pop culture research project :)

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Glad I can help. I didn't even know there was such a thing as "America's Top Model", or that they would go to Milan. However, since this *is* the fashion capital of the world (even I noticed that propaganda!), I'm not surprised to hear it.

[goddessofchaos.livejournal.com]

I hate being too warm when I'm in bed =/ Although I've turned this to my advantage recently - I set my heater to come on 15 minutes before I'm supposed to get up in the morning, at full blast, so by the time I wake up it's far too hot to go back to sleep and I'm forced to get up at a reasonable time instead of turning over for another, then another 10 minutes. (I have to trick myself into getting up in the mornings, it doesn't come naturally!)

[kareina.livejournal.com]

That is a fairly sensible idea. Have you seen dawn simulators? I used one when I lived in Alaska, and loved it. Tell it what time you want to wake up, and about 45 minutes before that it starts slowly turning the light on, in tiny, tiny increments, achieving full bright at the appointed time. At night when ready for bed hit "dusk", and it turns the light off over a 15 minute period, helping your body relax into sleep mode.

The only reason I'm not using mine here is because the one I have is old enough that one has to plug a lamp into it, and it into the wall, and I don't have a lamp here with a US plug. I did try plugging a lamp into an adaptor, and it into an adaptor, but it didn't work--I could turn the lamp on and off with it, but something about how it interacts with the adaptors kept it from doing the dawn and dusk trick. I tried getting one with UK plug (and a built in light) from Amazon when I was in Edinburgh for a job interview recently (wanted it to help wake up on the day of the interview), but they failed to deliver it to the house, so we wound up cancelling the order.

[goddessofchaos.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know of them and have considered getting one... I still might. It seems like a nice, natural way to wake up - although I'm still not convinced it would actually get me all the way off my mattress and up! I do like the idea of the light slowly fading at night though, it might help me get off to sleep.