Of Insomnia and Apples
A kitchen timer built into the digital stovetop dashboard seems like a great idea, right up until the millionth time you fail to notice you’ve mistakenly turned off the oven rather than the timer. Now I’ll be up late waiting for this baked apple pastry concoction to finish. It takes about three hours to bake, and would have been done right about now, but it sat unnoticed and unbaked in a cold oven for hours. Fortunately, that’s not likely to represent a health risk given the ingredients: sugar, butter, puff pastry, and apples. And I forgot to defrost the puff pastry, so I wound up snapping it into bits and pieces that I arranged like roof shingles.
I slept very poorly last night and have been making annoying mistakes all day.
Sleeping was going well at first, but then I rolled over onto the remote for the adjustable bed. The head of the bed kept raising, raising, raising, RAISING as I flopped about trying to figure out where the infernal gizmo was hiding. I eventually located it, as one might anticipate, beneath a buttock. I reset the bed position back to normal, and placed the remote on the small bedside table. However, the small bedside table is too small, and the white noise machine1 on the too small table went crashing to the floor, with the remote tumbling after. Batteries were everywhere.
Now I was up. And as long as I was up, I figured I’d resolve the table situation by hopping on Entsy to find something more practical for the space. That space being about 70 inches long by 10 inches deep. They’ll have stuff like that on that Entsy. And they did. I ordered a handcrafted console table made of reclaimed wood. American made. Will it turn out to be a bunch of 2x4s from Home Despot slathered in yellow craft paint? Possibly. We’ll have to wait and see. I usually have good luck there, but I did not go top dollar.
I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning. Then I had to get up early for a 7 a.m. work thing. When I logged on, I discovered that it had been rescheduled by someone during the off hours. We were now meeting at noon, which felt somehow worse for ruining everyone’s lunch, but it wound up being rescheduled again, this time for later in the afternoon. Which was fine.
Now I’m so exhausted it has me nauseated and well past ready for bed. I’m on call tonight, too, likely to be awakened at random in the dead of night for various and sundry reasons. And here I am trapped, waiting on an apple tart of a thing that by rights ought to have been in my belly hours ago. It better be delicious. It will be delicious.
You best believe I just now ordered a standalone kitchen timer, too.
Footnotes
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The ringing in my ears is significantly intrusive in the evenings when the ambient drone of civilization has quieted down a bit. The white noise helps drown it out. Or maybe it distracts me. Tinnitus is both strange and unpleasant. ↩