kareina

Early this afternoon lord_kjar and I went out to purchase some supplies so that we can make a better hammer dulcimer stand than the improvised one we have been using that started life as the support for a portable table. We did, in fact, get those supplies. However, while we were out we also bought a bed.

We have been thinking of getting one for a while--we have gotten the moldy floor out of the downstairs room and re-painted it, so now it is set up ready to be a guest room, but it lacked a good bed. We still have the bed frame from the bed we have been sleeping on, but we moved the mattress to the floor months ago, rotated it 90 degrees, added an extension to the (new) foot end made of cheap foam. We have been enjoying having a larger bed to sleep on (and one where his feet don't hang over the edge. However, it felt weird to step on the foam end on my way into bed at night, since it was way squishier than the rest of the mattress. So it has been in the back of the mind that we should buy us a larger bed and put the old mattress back on its frame for the guest room downstairs.

However, beds aren't cheap, so while it sounded appealing, it also sounded expensive, and I have been thinking we would wait till we are certain that I have some sort of employment lined up (since my current contract ends at the end of this month). But while we were out we decided to stop by a bed store to see what prices were like, with no intention of buying anything today. Yah, right.

We left the store with one of those new high-tech foam mattresses that change their shape when you press on them, and then slowly revert to the original shape when you let go. If feels a bit weird, but totally comfortable to lay down on. And, because it is foam, even though it is about 30 cm thick, and king-sized (180 x 200 cm), we could fold it in half and carry it home in our car.

Expensive? Yup (a cost a bit more than 1.5 nyckleharpas), but because we bought the display model today, rather than waiting, he did sell it to us for way less than the list price (which was more than 2.5 nyckleharpas). I am looking forward to sleeping on it, and finding out if the fairly recent thing I have had where my back hurts a bit if I sleep for more than 7 hours is still an issue on the new type of mattress. I am guessing that it will no longer be a problem (and one could say I just bet a fairly hefty chunk of cash on it). And we have the guest room ready for houseguests next weekend for the Spelmanstämman event, which is a bonus.

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...

Part way thorough my PhD program I decided to start tracking how I was spending my hours, and set up a spreadsheet to keep track of half a dozen categories

*uni work
*exercise
*reading/e-mail/livejournal/etc. or, more rarely, watching a movie, play or concert
*useful tasks
*social
*sleep

looking back over the graph most of these categories have very wavy lines--up one month, down the next. There is only one category which shows a consistent downward trend, and that is sleep. The first four months of my record I averaged more than 8 hours of sleep every night. Then spring arrived, and I started getting less sleep each night, with the average dropping to right on, or only barely below, 8 hours/night for the next 7 months. Then I hit the need-to-finish-the-thesis-ASAP crunch, and sleep dropped to only about 7.5 hours/month (other than the month I finished, where it dropped to less than 6.5 hours/night average for the whole month (keep in mind that half of that month was thesis finishing, the other half was traveling, and I am pretty certain that I got more sleep while traveling, so the low was certainly even lower than that!). Since finishing my thesis a year ago and moving to Milan I've been averaging between 7.2 and 7.6 hours of sleep/night (looking at the totals for each month as a whole).

This explains why I've generally got dark circles under my eyes, and now I'm wondering if I'd have better luck keeping my hours of uni work/week as high as I want it to be if I were getting more sleep. Therefore I'm going to try an experiment--with a new month starting in a couple of days, I'm going to see if I can push my average hours of sleep for August to (or even over) 8 hours/day, just to see what it does to my energy levels and uni work. This will be an interesting month to try this because I'll be traveling for part of it, and when I'm not traveling it will likely be way hot, which could interfere with my being able to sleep at all. I'll try to remember to report back on the topic at the end of the month.

In other news, it was a lovely day today--it rained this morning, and never got hot all day. I was able to walk to the store which carries the cheese I like (a 30 minute walk, each way), and the cheese, butter and yoghurt was all still nice and cool when I got it out of my backpack when I got home!

Today's uni progress report: Started a word document for a paper that will summarize the results of my research here, using a paper written by my predecessor as a template (at my boss'es suggestion), filled in a bit of data in bullet points in the outline, then spent some time processing data. Confirmed that the experiment that I'd started before leaving and which had the heat turned off just before I left had, in fact, been re-heated and it is going fine--we should be able to download that one next week. Booked time for the microprobe for the following week to analyze that experiment.

Now it is nearly midnight, and I still need to read my 1000 words of geologic literature and do my yoga before bed, so if I want to get more sleep I'm either going to have to sleep in in the morning, or get a nap at some point...