“Can’t anyone in this family sleep?” ~My sister Nicole, 2009

I have battled insomnia all my life. There’s nothing unusual about my insomnia… like so many others, I find it difficult to shut off the chatter in my brain. My wife Abby complains of this, as does my friend Wil Fry. (Read about his insomnia here.)

Tonight was an odd one. I fell asleep as Abby and I watched Criminal Minds on Netflix. It’s a second-tier show for us, but in the past few weeks we’ve been watching it off and on to cleanse our viewing pallets after watching something intense: The Godfather trilogy, most recently.

I was in bed by 10:30, but at about 2:30, I was wide awake. There were several things on my mind, including a potential conflict at work that, while not affecting me directly, will have an impact on my work situation.

Abby came to bed soon after I woke up. She’d been crafting a crochet project and didn’t want to put it down until she solved certain problems, which she did. At that point we both read for a while (me on my iPad and her on her Kindle), but it didn’t put me out as I’d hoped.

Abby can’t sleep if she gets too cold, and I can’t sleep if I get too hot, and there is a very narrow margin of temperature in which we are both comfortable.

So here I am, trying to read something political to bore me back to sleep, but it’s not working. Part of the problem might be that I chose to read about the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which is actually quite interesting. But then I noticed a system upgrade had crashed on one of our laptop computers, and my heels itched, and I had the sniffles. (If I go to bed with the sniffles, I will wake Abby.)

I made a couple of images of Christmas lights, with only marginal success. And I am writing this entry.