For whom the chime tolls

When you live in a large metropolitan city like Toronto your concept of personal space changes. Things like front lawns and spaces between houses just don't exist. There is no such thing as quiet, unless something terrible is afoot. It's noisy, but you get used to it.

The sound of cars driving by the house helps to wake me up on weekdays. The sound of jets making their final approach to Pearson helps lull me to sleep at night as I watch them cross the sky. Sometimes I can even hear the wheels on the Queen streetcar as it makes its way west and that makes me remember the trams in Prague. For someone who grew up with the sounds of wind and waves at night, I think I've adjusted well to sounds of city life.

Except for one thing.

We live in an old neighbourhood and the houses are closely tucked together. One of the houses across the street has put up a set of wind chimes. I can only assume that their bedroom is at the back of the house, because these chimes make the most annoying "tink" noise. I can confirm that it's nearly impossible to get a good night's sleep when those things are moving. They drive me crazy.

As such, I'm not sure what to do about them. The weather is going to get warm soon, and the windows will be open wide again. I think my head will actually blow clear off my body with rage if I have to hear those things much longer. But what to do?

I've thought about writing them a letter, explaining that the noise that the chimes make at night keep me and my husband awake. I don't want to rain on their parade. I imagine they put them up because they like them and I know that as soon as they get that letter, I will become that whiny bitch across the street who made them take down their wind chimes. And I don't really want to be that. I already don't fit in our area, as it's full of pinko hippies. (I'm kidding. It's only partly full of pinko hippies).

So the letter option doesn't seem to be good. I don't actually know the people who live in that house, so I can't just run into them in the street and say "Hey, about your wind chime." And I know if I do that it's going to be a situation where the wind chime was made by a one handed Peruvian orphan, and again, aren't I a whiny bitch for asking them to take it down.

This leaves me with two options. One I can, in the middle of the night, creep over to the house and liberate the wind chimes. I'd rather not engage in petty theft, because I very much respect the property of others, as I would hope they would respect mine. The other option involves less theft, but it still is a slight dis to property rights.

I'm thinking of creating chime socks. Little covers that I could sneak over and slide over the chimes. It wouldn't damage the chimes, it wouldn't involve stealing the chimes, most importantly it would silence the chimes and when the people woke up in the morning, they would get the no-so-subtle hint that they are making an annoying racket from an anonymous source.

Brilliant, no?

Today's sing-a-long song: "Wind chimes" by The Beach Boys

Cleaning habits die hard

When I was younger and when I was living on my own, I used to stay up into the wee hours of the morning cleaning. I know, I was so wild and crazy it's hard to imagine how I made it through my youth with all my limbs and organs in tact. There would be days when I would decide that things had to be scrubbed, reorganized and reordered. Living with M for the last seven years ostensibly put an end to the late night OCD cleaning episodes.

Having to respect that there is, indeed, someone else in the house and that it can really mess up his sleeping patterns if I am up at 2 a.m. making all the books in the guest room line up just so, really helped with using the night for more practical things like sleeping. I have to confess that whenever he travels and I am at home alone, I go to bed in the cleanest of all possible worlds. I'd rather have him with me at night one hundred times out of a hundred, but the OCDist within has a special moment when things are properly sorted. I suppose it's a neurotic way of finding solace in being apart. I clean because I miss him?

Anyway, it's after 11 and I have no inklings of being able to sleep. I've been cleaning fairly intensely for a school night. I would have kept going if M hadn't retired for the night.

I guess I just have to go through this a couple of times a year. The last bout of insomnia brought the revelation that turning my clock away from me would end all the terrible clock watching, at it is wonderful to be free of that. Now I just have to sort out how to stop watching the jets on final approach to Pearson through the window all night. I must have passed an hour or two last night wondering about all the people on those planes. Where they were coming from, what their lives were like and if their homes were clean.

Today's sing-a-long song: "Sleep Tonight" by Stars

HRH

I am Sisyphus and doing the laundry is my rock

In which our heroine comes up from Olympics watching for a breath of air, gets "the dress", ponders if her insomnia is actually an existential crisis and wonders if it was having to dry socks that made Camus and Satre so jaded...

Okay, does anyone else get choked up when they watch an athlete who's won gold singing along to their national anthem or am I one step away from becoming a Hallmark-loving, minivan driving, sap? Perplexing.

Anyway, a few updates while I've turned away from the three stations showing Olympic coverage...

Last Saturday my mother and I purchased my wedding dress in under 20 minutes. Of course the two weeks of pondering the options didn't hurt my decision abilities one bit. We got out of the bridal salon just as a total princess bride (and I mean that in the pejorative way) walked in. You have to wonder who exactly agrees to marry people like that. But I digress. Pretty dress procured. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

I'm still not sleeping anywhere close to enough. I did sleep on Saturday after having a very long and active day. And I napped the whole way through Sunday. Hopefully that will be enough to get me through this week.

I am trying to get out of this sleeping headgame. I now turn my alarm clock away from me so I can't count the minutes and hours I'm not sleeping as they pass by. The cat waking me up an hour before my alarm goes off is not a great deal of help either, but such is the life of a cat owner.

Friends and readers have given me a lot of good suggestions and have tried most of them (save John R's suggestion of turning off my alarm clock. MADNESS I tell you!) and they've only made me more awake so far.

The problem is that I simply cannot get my brain to stop and even when I've lulled it into relative quiet, I'm shaken out of sleep by noise or a cat. And the things I think of... so random and from all the time periods of my life. Things I'd totally forgotten, embarrassing moments I'd blocked out...I try to think of pleasant serial memories and I do and then I'm off on a series of mental tangents that get my brain whirring again.

I haven't gotten my hands on any relaxation CDs yet, mostly out of consideration for M. I tried to bring the owl with me to bed one night and M found the tone and melody creepy, citing that they use that kind of music in horror movies for a reason. The reading thing just gets my mind going even more (granted I'm not reading fiction as I haven't been able to read fiction in almost two-and-a-half years). I'm about to start a book on the history of Japan. At least this bout of insomnia has been educational.

As for the anonymous poster's suggestion, that's truly an avenue to being totally awake for me. Thanks though.

Because of the way I have to spread out the pills I take during the day, any calcium I take a bed time would counteract the iron supplements I seem to constantly have to take. Not that being off iron makes me sleepy, no, just listless. Also I just don't want to take anything like a supplement to sleep. It's taken me a long time to get my pills into working and effective balance and I don't want to throw that off with herbals that, generally speaking, are poorly regulated and not in truly predictable doses, at least here in Canada.

So what's left? Drying socks. I have been doing laundry in this dryer for more than two years now and I still have not figured out the right balance of clothes to get M's socks dry in a single dryer cycle. Like having to do laundry once a week isn't annoying enough, but to have this perpetual failure! I take laundry far too seriously.

Today's sing-a-long song: "As The Days Are Long" by Tory Cassis

HRH

The insomnia of Chelsea produces monsters

I had a really good sleep a few weeks back. Like one of those sleeps that the people in mattress commercials pretend they're having. The kind of sleep that Dagny Taggart always seemed to have. It was spectacular. However it seems that I experienced that blissful sleep at a price. That price being that I've slept about three to four hours a night for the past two weeks.

I'm a creature that does not function well without a good amount of sleep. At least seven to eight hours a night. For the last two weeks it's just been getting worse and worse and I can't figure out what's keeping me awake. I'm quite happy, my friends and family are happy and healthy, work is no more stressful than usual, I exercise at least three times a week, I eat healthily... I just don't get it. Things are really good, so why am I not sleeping?

I'm not hallucinating yet, but things are starting to develop a bit of a haze around them. M has suggested that when I sleep I'm not actually sleeping, but I have a split personality that is secretly flying across the country starting makeup clubs. I guess it's when women secretly take their femininity back? ("Her name was Elizabeth Arden... Her name was Elizabeth Arden...")

Anyway I don't want to resort to anything chemical to help me sleep as natural sleep is what I really need. I've tried warm drinks, I've tried playing video games, I've tried imagining a ball moving slowly around an infinity symbol, I've tried saying words like "applecake" over and over again until the word loses all meaning, I've even once tried taking a shot of Bekerovka (the result was me passed out, not sleeping). No change. I can be barely awake at 9:30, but the moment I'm in bed I'm wide awake and staring at the clock for hours on end.

So tonight I'm down to the bottom of the barrel for non-chemical sleep aids. Even though I'm exhausted, I ran a little harder than usual on the treadmill today and I had some rice with dinner in the hope that fatigue and carbs will combine to create a coma. I'm also going to try to meditate, even though I have no idea how it's done. Apparently you have to try and concentrate on something and just one thing for 30 minutes. I don't think I've ever been able to do that, let alone actually sit still for 30 minutes. When I told M about this he asks if I was turning into a hippie and then offered to put on a Yanni CD for me. I didn't think we even owned Yanni CD. God I hope we don't.

If all that doesn't work, I may haul out my old organic chemistry textbook or one of my Czech workbooks, because they used to put me out like a light. My last resort will be fetching a musical toy I had as a child, an orange owl, that played a soothing lullaby. The music would slow down as the owl would run out of power. I'm sure M will love the melody.

So wish me luck and if anyone has any suggestions of how to naturally fall asleep or if someone has the magic guide to actually getting your brain to stop, let me know. Please, please, please let me know.

Today's sing-a-long song: "Calculation Theme" by Metric

HRH