Snoozefest

I have a really hard time waking up. That is a fact known throughout the galaxy. It is as though there was a gas leak in my room, or a big heavy blanket wrapped around my head. Our bed, huge, comfortable, and covered with goose down, does not help this situation at all.

So, as you might guess, I will do anything to sleep as long as possible by cutting all unnecessary actions out of my morning routine, and employing sleep-enabling gadgets in my house, like my snooze-happy alarm clock.

This is an evil, evil alarm clock, insidiously equipped with a deadly "variable snooze button". I press once, I sleep 10 more minutes. I press twice, I sleep 20 more minutes. Seems straight-forward enough. But add in the fact that I am semi-comatose, and using mainly my rat-brain in that state of consciousness, and you begin to see the problem. A simple reinforcement process propels me into more and more presses of the button, just like a lab mouse pressing a lever to get food pellets. Pretty soon I'm playing the button like a semi-automatic rifle trigger in a firefight and sleeping until noon.

What I need is something that will make me totally uncomfortable, something irritating and dangerous, to get me out of bed as though my life depended on it. Perhaps a flame-throwing robot, or a giant billowing bag of itching powder precariously hovering above my head. Perhaps.

But for now, I'll keep setting my alarm for 5:30AM and getting up at 7:00, or 7:30, or...whenever.