Thursday, August 10, 2006

Snooze

I swear, the snooze button on our alarm clock is getting more and more of a workout as time goes by. We keep setting the time back so we can have more snoozes before we absolutely have to wake up. We're practically at the point of setting the alarm for 2:00 am. The only thing that drags me out of bed in a timely manner is the promise of a bottomless Diet Coke at Noah's Bagels.

Which reminds me of my first week in Norway. Being that between Utah and Norway, there is a nine-hour time difference, it should come as no surprise that I experienced jetlag from the trip. (Today I swear I feel jetlag when we fly to Salt Lake from Portland, with its one-hour time difference...but we're also setting our clocks back 50 years, so that's probably it.) Anyway, our mission president believed that the best solution to jetlag wasn't to sleep but to get out and work the crazy hours of a missionary. (Nowadays I know that the cure for jetlag is caffeine and lots of it.) So for the first few days, that's what I did. Rising, zombie-like at 6:30 in the morning, stumbling around during the day listening to a language I could barely decipher, and crashing into sweet, sweet slumber at night. Well, after about a week of this, we came home for lunch and the other missionaries were already there and had prepared some food for us. Since we didn't have any food prep time, we had about 45 minutes after lunch and before the next bus came. My companion, whom I'll call Elder Bullwhip, because he was always cracking it to get me going, said he'd allow a nap and that he felt like taking a short one, too. So he carefully set his alarm clock for 30 minutes and laid down. I fell asleep instantly, but after twenty minutes, all the juice I'd drunk during lunch served as a biological alarm clock and I woke up to go to the bathroom. Coming back to my room, I glanced in Elder Bullwhip's room and saw that he was soundly sleeping. In an act I can only blame on the sleep deprivation, I crept into his bedroom and silently as possible, reached up and turned off his alarm clock, then crept back to my bed. And when I say crept, I really mean it...I was so sleep deprived that I'd do anything for a little more sleep, even lower myself to crawling on hands and knees and kill someone silently in their sleep. Fortunately the opportunity to turn off the alarm clock spared me the messiness of a homicide. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Elder Bullwhip was jolted awake by the sound of the bus zooming by our house...another not to return for another sweet, sweet hour. He kept cussing himself out for setting the alarm clock but forgetting to turn it on. As for me, I just rolled over and got another 45 minutes of much needed sleep. I didn't tell him what I'd done until he was getting ready to go home. Fortunately he'd mellowed out (something that I hope I played a role in, since I think that was why I was sent to Norway--to teach how to not take this whole "religion" thing so seriously).

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