Wake Up! It's the Zombie Apocalypse

I’ve been thinking a lot about zombies lately.

Mostly, because I feel like I’m turning into one.

I’m dealing with some health issues that are screwing up my nights. Normal people go to bed, go to sleep and wake up the next morning. My nights are more like a series of cat naps. (I hate those commercials where the woman wakes to the morning sun warming her face,  jumps up, pulls on her running shoes and dashes out the door for a five-miler. Or the coffee commercials where the guy rolls over, stretches luxuriously, smells the coffee and ends up on a deck, overlooking a misty lake, with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. I have NEVER woken up like that…my entire life. When my alarm goes off at 5:35 a.m. my first thoughts are about semi-humane ways to kill myself. I am NOT a morning person.}

It’s my understanding that to wake refreshed (as these commercial people do) you need to have restful, restorative sleep experiences.

There are four stages of sleep. The first two are what the experts call “light sleep”…ideally you would sink deeper and deeper into Stage 3 and Stage 4 – what they call “delta” sleep. REM sleep is part of the deeper stages. Rapid Eye Movement (REM) is when you dream. The deeper sleep stages are where your mind re-boots, so to speak. The body needs this reboot desperately. Without regular, restorative sleep a person experiences sleep deprivation.

So because my nights are interrupted (and believe me, that is as much an understatement as saying flesh-eating bacteria hurts), I rarely achieve my delta stage. I spend most nights in light sleep…skimming the sleep depths, rather than submerging completely. I wake easily (often with the help of my cat, who feels compelled to wander the hallway outside my bedroom at any hour, yowling like she’s being roasted over a slow fire.)

I am not rebooting.

I am sleep deprived. Severely deprived. Intensely deprived.

Experts are now telling us that chronic sleep deprivation kills off brain cells. Since my particular deprivation has been going on for almost a year, I guess I’m working on a lobotomy the hard way.

Which brings me back to zombies. I think everyone’s got it wrong. There’s no virus, no plague, no evil serum turning humans into zombies. These folks are TIRED, people. They’re so sleep deprived that their brains are dissolving. Of COURSE, they want to rip your throat out. Being tired makes everyone cranky. (You ought to see me some days at work. Say “Good morning” to me and you might lose your trachea. It may technically be “morning,” but it’s NOT “good.”)

So my advice to Andrew Lincoln (AMC’s “The Walking Dead”) or Brad Pitt (“World War Z”) or anybody else dealing with staggering, corpse-like neighbors, is to get those poor guys some Ambien for heck sake. All they need is a good night’s sleep.

Happiness and Four-Letter Words

There are BAD four-letter words.

$%@&!

*#$&!

+&@%!

 And then there are GOOD four-letter words.

Free 
Live

Love

And then there's... 

 It doesn’t take much to make me happy. That beautiful Blue and Yellow four-letter word will do it almost immediately. 

 I love IKEA. I think I could LIVE at IKEA. And the love affair has been going on for some time.

 I’d never heard of this amazing place in 2003, when my best friend Vicki suggested we stop at the IKEA in Emeryville on our way to The City. (If you grew up in the Central Valley of California, San Francisco was “The City.”) I’m always up for shopping, but nothing I’d experienced before prepared me for the sheer awesomeness of IKEA. I think I walked all the way through the showroom with my mouth open. (Thank goodness there were no flies.)

Because I was just visiting there (as opposed to living there) and had an 800 mile trip home and space in the car was at a premium, the only purchases I made were several wall shelves. But since Utah got their very own IKEA, I have worked very hard at not limiting myself. (I'm happy to report the hard work has really paid off!)

When I moved last year I left a craftroom that had shelves and cupboards and drawers.

 I went to a new place where the room I planned to dedicate to crafting (as you can see, formerly a bedroom) had NOTHING…except walls and a floor and two closets. (Also UGLY drapes...but those went first.)

Needless to say, I’ve been VERY grateful for IKEA.

I have been fretting over how to store my ribbon (I am the Ribbon Queen of Orem, Utah). But finally I thought to try an IKEA spice rack and it’s going to be fabulous. The 3 ¼ inch spools fit perfectly and there’s that rail thingee that the ribbon end can run under.

Just thinking about painting all those spice racks white and hanging them on the wall (above my IKEA craft tables...and Expedit cube...and Trofast storage units) makes me all warm and squooshy inside.

See? Such happiness from so little…just IKEA. I love you IKEA. If there’s no IKEA in Heaven, I’m not going.

I Just Might Need an Intervention

I returned from lunch the other day to find the Taffy Fairy from the university's bookstore had visited my desk. 

The bookstore promotions folks are lovely people, really. They email us when there are specials and they invite us, every year, to the big Office Products Show…where we wander around checking out vendor booths with all the great new merchandise. (WOW!! Have you seen the super new file folder styles??? Gosh, look at that cute little ball point pen, what a great idea to add a lanyard so you will never lose it! I mean, c’mon guys…how exciting ARE office products???)

But it's still fun to go to the show…occasionally they do have cool new things that give me the warm fuzzies. They also have drawings for awesome stuff – like iPads or zip drives or laptop cases. And we always leave with plastic bags chock-full of give-away items (more of those nifty file folders and pens-on-a-cord type of things, but still free - and even if you don't actually NEED it, free is always good).

And then every few months they also send the Taffy Fairy around to all the offices where they fill up our custom-monogrammed (with the bookstore logo) candy jars with salt water taffy.

We’re supposed to place these jars strategically on our desks so everyone in the office can enjoy the bookstore’s largesse.

Unfortunately, this is a problem for me. I’m hooked on sugar. I know…it’s bad for you. It does awful things to your spleen…or is it your pancreas? Liver? No, that’s alcohol… But it’s bad. I have a love/hate relationship with sugar. I love it. It hates me. (That’s actually been the story of most of my relationships.)

So here is MY candy jar today:

And here are the other jars in my area:

Notice anything? Yes, their jars are still mostly full. Mine is mostly empty. (Except for the white ones – those are licorice. I loathe licorice.)

For me these randomly frequent bestowals are equivalent to someone helpfully passing out mini-bottles at the door of an AA meeting. Or a kind, generous soul cooking up some crack at the Betty Ford Clinic.

I should ask them to stop bringing taffy. But I’m not going to.