The Dow Is Up!

Lately, I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep. Don’t feel sorry for me because it’s all my fault. Over the weekend, I was in Door County, WI, drinking my butt off with my friends. Since The Wife and I took Luke with us, we were both up relatively early every morning. After staying up late Friday and Saturday, I couldn’t fall asleep early on Sunday.

On Monday, I stayed up late catching up on old episodes of Deadwood. This is such a great show. I’m more than just a little upset that they’re cancelling the series. I’m going to miss Al Swearengen.

Part of my problem falling asleep (and staying that way) was that we had the windows open. Given the ridiculous heat this summer, we haven’t opened a window in three months. I LOVE sleeping with the windows open. There’s just something great about fresh, cool air when you’re sleeping. The problem is that our street is a little busy, with cars going by all night. That, and it wasn’t really “cool” out. So even IF I went to bed early (which I didn’t), the constant waking wouldn’t have helped.

Another problem with having the windows open is that it somehow turned me into a cat magnet. We have weird cats. (Okay, most cats are weird. That’s what makes them cats. But ours seem exceptionally weird. At least to me.) As soon as the windows opened, both cats decided they had to sleep on the bed. This shouldn’t be such a big problem because we have a king-size bed. In fact, this is WHY we got the king-size bed. Sleeping on a full or queen bed with two cats isn’t fun. But now that we have the bigger bed? It doesn’t matter. Those stupid cats insist on walking on our heads, sleeping between our legs, pushing us out of bed, you name it.

Last night, I decided to turn on the AC and get a good night’s sleep. Of course, it didn’t happen. I was all set to go to bed at 10:00, which would guarantee me 8 hours of sleep. That’s usually enough to get me caught up on whatever sleep I missed. Of course, I couldn’t fall asleep. My mind wouldn’t stop racing. I kept thinking about various job-related stuff. (I won’t go into details just yet. Stay tuned.)

I decided to sleep on the couch where the soothing sounds of The Simpsons could rock me to sleep. And it worked! I fell asleep by 10:30 and didn’t wake until 2:00. I decided to head upstairs to bed, but I realized that my right arm wasn’t working right. I couldn’t feel anything below my elbow. In fact, I couldn’t MOVE my arm below my elbow either. Apparently, my arm was suffering the worst case of “being asleep” that I’ve ever encountered. (Is there a better term for it than that? “Pins and needles” isn’t accurate because I didn’t feel pins and needles. I felt NOTHING.)

This is not what you want to have happen when you’re trying to make a seamless transition from the couch to bed at 2:00 a.m. The problem is that I every second that went by where I didn’t have feeling in my arm made me think that my arm was dead. I started rubbing my arm and praying that the feeling would come back so that I wouldn’t ever have to explain to anyone how I lost my right arm. (I have enough problems telling people that how I got a scar on my chest because I was racing my bike home (in Chicago) to watch Magnum P.I. and got winged by a car door.)

So when I finally went upstairs to go to bed, I was wide awake. The Wife must have heard me getting into bed, because she checked to make sure it was me (and not a cat). She did this by swinging her arm right onto my head. Thanks, hon. That always helps me sleep. I’m not so sure that she wasn’t trying to crush one of our cats.