Sweet dreams are made of prescriptions

It's been a long week. Bleah. I don't know that I have much more to say besides that.

Ohhh, I'm sure I'll come up with something...

It's my new sleeping potion, I think. It's doing wonders for my crazy-making insomnia, but not so much for the day time. I'm groggy and headachey and it seems to take hours to wear off, even though I take HALF a pill and I take them at NINE-THIRTY. I'm not going to complain too much, though, because I'll take the hangover effect over middle-of-the-night-paranoia any day. I was encouraged to try Ambien, which is supposedly a fabulously magical wake-up-instantly-coherent sleeping pill, but Ambien is habit-forming. I appreciate the sentiment, but I've got enough drug addictions, thank you. I mean, what with all the Vicodin and everything...

JUST KIDDING, MOM.

No, really, the first time I ever told my doctor I had problems sleeping she ripped off a prescription for [extremely habit-forming ELEPHANT TRANQUILIZER] before I'd even finished talking. That little bottle of pills sat in my medicine cabinet for TWO YEARS, making me nervous every time I reached for the Costco-sized tub of Advil. I finally tried them a few months ago when I was getting super duper fed up with the no sleep situation, I MEAN IT, but those things work too well, you know. As in, "I suddenly feel light and floaty! I think I'll tuck into my big comfy bed! Nighty night!" Not exactly a, um, long term solution. Ideal for turbulent flights, a touch scary for someone fighting nightly battles with Mr. Sandman.

What's working for me now is my new potion, at least a half-hour of television garbage (oh, how I've missed you Nick and Jessica!) and getting into bed way before the time I've subconciously told myself I should be asleep. A bit of Dorothy Sayers and poof- I'm asleep, even if Phillip is trying to learn the bass line to "Sheep Go To Heaven" in the next room. If you're interested, here are Maggie's Tips for Sleeping Like A Normal Person: Exercise. Not eating sugar. (I KNOW. I don't want to believe it either. But holy crap I felt awesome the one week I went without cookies.) Getting your husband to make you laugh when it's dark out and all you're thinking about is whether or not you'll fall asleep that night. Someone told me that warm milk works, but ew, gross. And I did I mention TiVo? Oh holy and blessed TiVo? What doesn't work: wine. It was helping for a while, but should the happy tipsy subside and you want to throw back some Benadryl to notch up the drowsiness, your liver will end up like the moldy disintegrating coffee filter I found a few weeks after our Christmas party because I TOTALLY FORGOT WE EVEN MADE COFFEE. Because I don't drink coffee anymore- it's the second thing on the Doesn't Work list. Number three: All-engrossing thrillers (see: The Da Vinci Code) because hello- you're trying to calm DOWN. Also making the top ten: chocolate at night (supposedly it has caffeine, but that just might be a HUGE NASTY TRICK someone is playing on me), self-diagnosing oneself via Google and lying awake in bed, in the dark, late at night, when your husband is snoring and the water in the gutters keeps drip-drip-drip-dripping and you are slowly going INSANE. Get out of bed and watch TV. That's what TiVo is for.

The best thing you can do? Remind yourself that not getting "enough" sleep is RARELY as bad as you tell yourself it will be.

ANYWAY,  I'm grateful for a weekend that does not involve waking up early, running errands, doing laundry, or frightfully dumb entrance exams. In fact, I have nothing to do. How amazing is that? I need to fit in a few laps around Green Lake, lunch with a friend and a week's worth of TiVo I didn't get to during the week, but I think we agree that none of that qualifies as Stressful. The only potentially high-stress situation I'm liable to encounter is the conversation I'll have with my husband after spending hours looking up townhouses on real estate websites. Because we got pre-approved this morning and I am ready to shop. Phillip, on the other hand, as the person who actually discussed the details with the bank (whatever, I was at work) and therefore the person in the relationship for whom $[super huge bucket of cash] does not mean "FREE MONEY!", is a tad more reticent. I understand the phrase "mortgage payment"- that means "a little more than rent", but "closing costs" and "down payments" and "other miscellaneous fees I haven't even heard of yet"- yeah... not really thinking about that. Phillip is all, "You're not going to start, like, house shopping now, are you? Because this pre-approval letter is just for our information" and I'm all, "Right right right. So what color should we paint the living room?"