Driving.

The drive between our parents' houses and our own house is about ninety minutes, and though she usually tries her best, Tamsen often falls asleep on the drive. (Not that I blame her. I'd fall asleep too, if I weren't driving.) She fell asleep on the drive home last night, and at one point, I felt a gentle poking on my arm. I looked over and asked her, "Hey, what are you doing?"

"Oh!" she said, clearly still asleep. "I thought you were a pillow."

This relationship is suffocating me!

As you know, Sam is, if not a sleepwalker, a sleep-acter-out-of-things. A few months back I woke up to find him sitting up on his knees in the middle of the bed.

me: Sam, what are you doing?

Oblivious to my query (or perhaps in response to it) he picked up his pillow and started beating the wall with it. I chose that moment to scoot as far over to my side of the bed as I could get.

Folks, if I'm ever found beaten to death with a pillow, as unlikely as that coroner's report might be, you know who the culprit is.

Alarm.

School has started for me here in Eugene, but since Tamsen and I aren't allowed to move into our new apartment until October 1, I'm staying with some very kind people in our ward. I drove from Portland to Eugene on Monday morning so I could be in my workshop at 8:00, which meant I had to leave Portland around 5:30. I was pretty tired all day, and by the time I arrived at the house where I was going to stay, I just wanted to fall asleep.

So that's more or less what I did. I set the time on the alarm clock next to the bed, set the alarm, and went to sleep around 9.30. I generally have a hard time falling asleep under different circumstances than I'm used to (I didn't fall asleep until 3.00 the night before because I knew I had to get up early, which only made me even more tired), but I figured I was exhausted enough that I wouldn't have any trouble.

Clearly something went wrong, or else I wouldn't be writing about it. I tend to have a hard time separating dreams from reality when I'm tired, and sometimes I act our my dreams with hilarious results. (See also the entirety of this blog.) This was one of those times, so when you read the following paragraphs, pretend that you're in that half-sleeping half-awake state.

My eyes snapped open at 11.30. I heard a beep coming from downstairs. Oh no! When I set the alarm clock next to the bed, I must have set off the alarm system for the house! I jumped out of bed, turned on the light, and ran around the room clutching my hair saying "oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no OH NO oh no oh no oh no" trying to figure out what to do. I knew I only had thirty seconds to disarm the alarm before it started screaming and waking up not only the kind people who gave me a place to stay, but their entire neighborhood.

So I ran down the stairs, still saying "oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh NO oh no," frantically searching for a panel on the wall where I could disarm the alarm. I knew it would be easy to find, since it would have a huge LCD display with a timer counting down to zero. (By my sleep-deprived reckoning, I should still have had fifteen seconds to go, even though I actually spent about two full minutes running around in my room in a panic.) I ran out into the kitchen to see two loaves of bread sitting on top of the oven, having just finished baking.

And then it hit me that the beep I heard must have been the timer for the oven.

And then it hit me that I probably hadn't actually tripped an alarm for the house just by setting an alarm clock.

And then it hit me that I had probably dreamed about tripping an alarm, but didn't realize it wasn't real when I woke up.

And then I was profoundly grateful that no one else had seen me run downstairs in a panic. I slunk back up the stairs, calmed myself down, and went back to my relatively uneventful sleep.

I want you to know, when you hold my hand, you hold my heart

A month or so ago we couldn't fall asleep, so what did we do? We listed all the phrases we could think of with "heart" in them and replaced the word with "fart."

Here is a smattering of what we came up with:

You're so hard-farted

She wears her fart on her sleeve

Open fart surgery

A member of the lonely farts club

Queen of farts

Let's have a fart to fart chat

This cereal is so fart-smart/fart healthy

Fartburn

Brokenfarted

Wild Farts Can't Be Broken

Fart attack

Be still my fart

Fart of gold

Eat your fart out

A change of fart

I have to follow my fart

Fart and soul

I had my fart set on going to the circus today

Absence makes the fart grow fonder

Cold hands, warm fart

In my fart of farts

Near to my fart

Fart failure

C'mon, have a fart!

Fart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Planeteers: Earth ,Fire, Wind, Water, and Fart

The American Fart Association

Achy Brakey Fart

The faint of fart

Crazy Fart

My fart's all a flutter

Learned it by fart

Cross my fart and hope to die

The way to a man's fart is through his stomach

Bless your fart

A man after my own fart

Bleeding fart liberals

Farts in Atlantis

A fart-felt apology

The Tell-Tale Fart

Faint fart never won fair lady

Yeah, we're real mature.

plugged up

I snore, so I got Sam some earplugs to wear. He'll put them in at night only to find them out in the morning, but we know they aren't falling out, because they'll be placed neatly, side by side on his nightstand. Apparently he can take them out in his sleep. He doesn't do it as much now that he knows about it, but they still fall out on their own sometimes. This morning I found one of his earplugs in the bed, so I tried to see if I could put it back in his ear without him noticing. As you can imagine, I was not very successful.

Clementine.

Tamsen leaves a bit earlier for work than I do, so she wakes me up and gives me a goodbye kiss before she goes. She usually says something goofy, too. This morning, she was singing, "Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my daaaaaaarling Sam-u-el."

I got up enough to give her a kiss and tried to think of something clever I could say back. After a bit of thinking, I settled on, "Don't be lost and gone forever, blah blah blah, blah, blah blah blah." Not that clever, but it would do for first thing in the morning.

Except I didn't hear her respond. I opened my eyes and found that a full 20 minutes had passed since she left.

The sea monkey has my money OR Tales of sleep talkers

A while ago I came into our room and started talking with Sam, only to find that he wasn't really awake. But he'd been talking back. I didn't know if he was sleep talking or what, so I decided to test him.

Me: Are you awake?

Sam: Yes.

Me: No you're not, you're asleep.

Sam: I am not asleep.

Me: You are too.

Sam (defensively): I am not!

Me: Okay then...what's your middle name?

Sam (a little too quickly): Sam!

Me (laughing): Your name is Sam Sam?

Sam: Wait, no. I meant...

Me: Ha! You are asleep. I knew it!

At this point all the talking made him wake up and he was sulky all over again (this time legitimately so) for being accused of being asleep when he wasn't. One of my sisters talked in her sleep growing up, which was maddening because as I was getting ready for bed I'd ask her something like "did you set the alarm?" and she'd assure me that she had when she actually hadn't. I used to grill her too, asking her if she was actually awake of not, but she was quite convincing and could carry on whole conversations, so I was often taken in. Although, that's nothing compared to my other sister who somehow managed to answer her phone in her sleep and talk to her best friend for 15 minutes before she realized anything was amiss. It went something like this-

H: Hello?

A: Hey, were you asleep?

H: (groggily defensive, because she actually is asleep) No! I'm awake.

A: (confused) Oh. Okay. How was the beach trip?


H went on to tell her all about the ward beach trip before introducing the subject of tigers.


H: And then we were divided into groups and we were the tigers.

A: Wait, what? After you got back you were tigers?

H: What? No, the tigers turned into T-shirts.

A: The tigers were T-shirts?

H: The T-shirts were T-shirts!

A: What T-shirts?

It was at this point that my sister woke up to find herself in mid conversation with a phone in her hand, and she very legitimately asked "Wait, what T-shirts?"