The very first advice I suggested to you when this “blob” was launched in 2010, was titled “Sleep is for Sissies”. It’s entirely possible – this may shock you to the core – that Octo-woman may have been a tiny bit misinformed. (Feel free to take a moment to gasp in disbelief.)
At the time I wrote the blob, I was 79 years old and still skating through my misbegotten life on 5 hours-or-less of sleep per night. Except for my teenage years when my mother yelled herself hoarse to get me up for school, sleeping was never high on my list of desirable or recommended habits. In my infancy, I was probably considered to be The Baby from Hell Who Never Sleeps, but I, on the other hand, always considered staying awake to be one of my magical superpowers, equivalent to getting excused from jury duty or the “illegible” traffic citations issued by apparently drunken and nearsighted police officers.
And it definitely had an important fringe benefit. According to my well-known impeccable logic, my minimal sleeping habit had endowed me with an additional 8 years of life. As I explained at the time, it seemed perfectly clear to me when I wrote this . . . .
That’s what I wrote then, but recently, I have experienced an epiphany. I don’t know how it happened, but I don’t seem able to skate by on 5 hours of sleep anymore. Or even 8. I’m hibernating like a doped-up grizzly bear sometimes 9 or 10 hours at a stretch.
I don’t know how, but I certainly know WHEN the phenomenon occurred.
It was in July of 2020. That’s when we moved to Kartar Ridge Ranch. The creatures that live here are very busy all day operating tractors or other strange machines, cars, occasional delivery trucks, or they’re grazing, munching grass, braying, quacking, chirping, howling, humping, meowing, hooting, hee-hawing, pooping, barking, growling and persecuting the mailman. Until night falls.
As soon as it gets faintly dark, it’s like somebody muted the sound system. City-bred natives like my son Matthew and me had to adjust to a kind of supernatural silence. We had to “give up” Seattle’s all day, all night sound of the traffic, horns honking, sirens, street sounds, gunshots, the chatter of helicopters, the clatter of garbage cans and recycling bins, and the X-rated calls of randy tomcats.
The city’s audio system was replaced with the Big Quiet of farmland. If the TV isn’t on, all we can hear is the occasional hum of the furnace, or seasonal conversation among coyotes, owls, frogs, or crickets. Everybody else except Matthew and me seemed to believe it was time to sink into sleep. And it is very, very, very Q – U – I – E – T.
So you can guess what happened. Pretty soon, along with all the other wildlife here, Matthew and I got sedated by Mother Nature, too! And that’s how my life-long unblemished low-sleep schedule has been severely contaminated, and why Octo-woman is no longer “woke”! My magical superpower of avoiding sleep is lost forever. But maybe not entirely.
The reason I brought this subject up is because it’s now 11:30 pm on New Year’s Eve, and everybody else in the household is asleep. That’s in spite of the fact that it’s just like the noisy good old days in the city. The Muckelshoot gambling casino a few miles from here stages a showy hours-long fireworks show to invite in the new year every December 31st. At the moment it sounds like the cowboys and Indians are fighting it out at the O.K. Corral, and the gunshots and explosions are definitely keeping the farm animals awake. Whoopie! Hats ‘n horns!
Me, too. I just made myself a nice sandwich, poured myself a glass of wine, and as soon as I post this, I’m going to put my feet up and enjoy my perfect excuse to stay awake all night and binge on TV.
But first, I better recalculate the bottom line to the increase in my additional sleep hours. So here goes. As of today, I’ve been alive for 33,355 days. If I had slept 8 hours each day (266,840 hours) I would have squandered a little over 30 years of my life in the sack. But if I only slept 5 hours per day (166,775 hours), I’d have only frittered away 19 valuable years slumbering unconscious, when I could been watching TV or playing bridge, or scribbling blobs for posterity, or eating popcorn, or making the world safe for Democracy.
The fact is though, that I have come to realize if I could have got by on 5 hours sleep per day for my entire my life, and if I only counted the hours when I was actually conscious, instead of my calendar age, I would probably look like this unfortunate lady and would be locked up in a high security house of detention among other derelicts of good health.
So that’s it for now. I hope you have a happy, safe, blessed, happy new year. And get some sleep!
I’m like that doggie in the bed. Sleep is the greatest gift known to people, except when my brain won’t shut down and I’m having a dream and I KNOW I’m asleep, but I can’t make it stop. I lay there, “knitting,” or “sewing” or “writing” a scene for my book, and I wake up jangled and tired. I hope now that you’re in the country, you wake up every day with the Folgers jingle in your heart!
Oh no, Octowoman, say it isn’t so! I thought we’d always be kindred spirits in our love of the wee hours of the morning. It’s been so comforting every 3am to know that just 3 hours away Octowoman is practicing piano, watching TV, or writing a blob. Now I suppose I’ll have to start going to bed at …what?? 2am?? 1am?? Please don’t say midnight 😲!!!
I hope your new extra hours of sleep allow you to enjoy even more of the daytime wonders of Kartar Ridge Ranch and the lovely folks who live there.
Happy New Year! 🥳
I simply have no idea how she does it! Mom has an amazing amount of energy at night and I wake up and do my best work at the crack of dawn.
She was a little confused when she moved to Kartar Ridge Ranch about how many years she was gaining by staying awake all night. I cannot follow her mathematical reasoning at this time. But I do know we are steadily easing her into the idea of blissfully sleeping for more than 2 or 3 hours at night!