CafeChatNoir

Really, I think she’d be an excellent asset in the interrogation department.  I’d give away state secrets in exchange for a decent night’s sleep.  Or, why the first words out of my brother’s mouth this morning were, “Next year, we need to stay at a hotel.”

My grandmother has always been an “up at the crack of dawn” person.  I don’t know if it’s the elderly thing, a Phoenix thing, or what.  (I recall a young cousin from the other side of the family once asking my mother, “Does your grandma ever sleep?”  At the time, the answer was “Not really.”)

For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has had a real problem with my getting sleep.  When she visited when I was a kid, she took great delight in “making sure I was up” – usually a couple hours *before* I had to get up.  Sleeping in on the weekends?  Oh HELL no.  Sleeping is for…hell, I don’t know, but certainly not for us.  (It might not have been quite so bad had her visits not lasted a month each time.  That’s a lot of being awakened every morning by a woman who thinks you should be running on her schedule.)

Now, to begin with, I can’t even attempt to go to bed until I’ve had at least an hour of being by myself after she goes to bed.  My grandmother “goes to bed” around 7PM.  What this really means is she gets ready for bed, and might even go to her room and stretch out on the bed for a while.  And then she bounces back to the den a dozen or so times after that.  Which is fine, I know lots of people that can’t get to sleep right away when they try to go to bed.  But, it’s pretty damn late by the time I get to bed, as I usually don’t even try to go to bed unless I am fairly confident I will actually be able to get to sleep in short order.  So, I’m already behind the curve before I even go to sleep.

Then there is the issue of “turning down the thermostat”…  I don’t disagree with the practice at all.  Back when I had a programmable thermostat, it automatically went down at night.  (Don’t do it as much at the current house, as little bro would freeze in the basement.)  However, there seems to be a disconnect on exactly what “turning it down” entails.  As it turns out, her definition of “turning it down” is TURNING THE HEAT OFF.  I thought we had come to a detente for a while where it was turned down (not off) to 70 at night.  (I still think the actual temp was lower than 70 because I have a hard time trusting a 30 year old spring-loaded-thermostat, but it is tolerable and far preferable to no heat at all.)

Until last night.  After I went to bed, I noticed she got up and was mucking with the thermostat.  (She has a magnifier w/a flashlight so she can see the numbers, and I saw the flashlight down the hall and knew what she was up to.)  I thought she was just double checking the temp (she doesn’t trust us to turn it down ourselves) and made a mental note to wait a few minutes and make sure she hadn’t turned it off, but I fell asleep.  (As I said, I don’t go to bed unless I’m ready to actually go to sleep.)

Well, she decided “off” was preferable to 70, which explains why I didn’t sleep for shit again last night because I was freezing, and why the heat had to run full blast for a good 20 minutes straight when she “turned it back up” this morning.  While she was also making as much noise as possible in the kitchen while we were still trying to sleep.  (The kitchen is right next to the room we’re sleeping in and there is no door/noise barrier.)

And to add insult to injury, I got up and came into the den just as she started her usual morning nap.  I certainly don’t begrudge her the nap, but after the furnace and the noisemaking in the kitchen – really??  REALLY???  Fortunately I was the first in the den, preventing Donald from grabbing two saucepans from the kitchen and banging them directly over her head.  (He’s a little sleep deprived, too.)

Sleep.  It’s good for family harmony.  Really.