Monday, January 16, 2012

In The Glow of The Little Green Lights

I can't remember the last time I slept a solid eight, seven or even six hours.

My routine seems to be waking up after 2 or 3 hours.  I can usually fall back to sleep after 15 minutes or so and get in another couple of hours.    
Most mornings I am up at 6:00-6:30.
I have accepted that this is my sleep pattern and I haven't really paid much attention to it. 

But, recently I took the "How Long Will I Live" test.   

These are my test results: 
Life Expectancy: 90.95
Lower Quartile: 84.21
Median Lifetime: 92.00
Upper Quartile: 98.58

According to these results, if I slept 7 hours a night instead of the 4 or 5 that I usually sleep, my life would be extended by .29 years.   What's that about 3 months longer?

I'm not sure that I am going to worry about living that extra 3 months, especially since the test says that I am guaranteed (but not in writing) to live to be over 90 years old.

But then I got to thinking about it.   I think it would depend on when those three months would be tacked on.  

For instance, if it were the middle of winter, and there was a blizzard and we couldn't really go anywhere anyway, I probably wouldn't care about those extra months.

However, if I was in the middle of a three month vacation that I had dreamed about my whole life, but really couldn't afford it until I was over 90 years old and those were my extra three months well, that would be a different story.

At about 3 a.m. this morning, I woke up, as I normally do.  I was vaguely aware of being annoyed at this little green light.  It was quite disturbing, actually.  But since I was still half asleep I think I just pulled a pillow or a blanket over my head to block out the light. 

When I woke up at 6:00, as I normally do, I took a good look around our bedroom.  This is what my nightstand looks like:


In that pile is an iPad, a MacBook Air laptop, a kindle, my iPhone and my iPod.

Ahh, there is that annoying little green light. It is coming from that "pluggie thing" on my laptop.

And next to all of those state of the art techie things is my old fashioned,  push button, plug into the wall, alarm clock phone.  

So there is a light on my kindle to tell me when it is fully charged, a light on my laptop to tell me when it is fully charged, the LED lights on my old fashioned phone to tell me the time. (which, incidentally,  is a reminder that I am awake and not sleeping and therefore losing some precious moments which might affect my 3 month extension.)

There are also the LED lights on the TV to remind us that it is a Visio.  The LED lights on the cable box tell the time.

This is what some of it looks like in the dark:




I wonder if I would sleep more soundly if I unplugged everything.


Maybe I will try that tonight.  Perhaps I will dream of the exotic places I will visit when I am an old woman living on borrowed time.

4 comments:

  1. Okay - like I have nothing better to do????? Yes, I took the quiz - 95.23 years - uuuuggggghhhhhhh  - NO thanks - that is too old.  Mostly, I suspect my good rating comes with my healthy genes and the fact that I do like to move.  Of course, they didn't ask any questions about bicycling.  I do enjoy a fast ride.  That has led to trouble but I suspect that I won't be riding too many fast bikes in my 80's.... 
    But, more importantly - RIGHT ON!  LOVE the nightstand photo - you're one of my Mac peeps!  I don't have the kindle but I have an ipod shuffle instead..... I have started doing books on my ipad.

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  2. Your tangle of cords looks much like my husband's side of the bed (and mine, honestly). He has two work laptops over on his side as well as his iPhone and the cords for both iPads (yes, he has more than one - both from work)...my side has my laptop cord (which rarely makes it into the bedroom nowadays), my iPhone cord and my old-fashioned alarm clock (digital, thank you very much). Oh, and we have a sleep number bed so there's a cord for the control for that, too.

    And now that I've had Little Man, I rarely sleep more than a couple of hours at night, even though he'll sleep 9 hours straight.

    *sigh*

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  3. I  can sleep any time I want, day or night, but never for more than three and a half or four hours.  My posts are generally done at one or two in the morning, not because I am a night owl, but because I am an "early bird."  The upside is, as I have noted, that I can sleep any time during the day that I want and do so routinely.

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  4. Life Expectancy: 94.12Lower Quartile : 87.44Median Lifetime: 95.89 Upper Quartile : 103.26

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