Rude Awakening

One of the perks of being retired -- or whatever the heck it is that I am -- is being able to take a nap during the day.

I've stopped being coy about it, pretending that I just happened to nod off when I sat down for a minute. Unlike our granddaughter, I actually like sleeping and I like taking a nap in the afternoon.

Of course, perhaps if I slept more at night it wouldn't be quite as necessary. Last night the puppies, uncharacteristically, got me up much too early. I'm not sure what their problem was, but both of them started barking their "please let me out!" bark at 4 a.m. Given that William hardly barks at all, I figured if he needed to heed nature's call, it must be pretty desperate.

I was able to get back to sleep again, but only after about an hour and I never sleep quite as soundly sitting in a chair under two dogs as I do lying down somewhere with the dogs nicely curled up at my feet or, better, like Sheila, lying down adoringly, on the floor beside wherever it is that I am sleeping, ready to jump to her feet and celebrate my waking up, whenever that happens, but leaving the decision about that to me.

The problem with taking an afternoon nap is that all adults don't take naps. And the adults that are awake feel the need to call you while you are sleeping.

Nobody would dream of calling me at 2 a.m. unless there was a terrible emergency, but nobody thinks a think about interrupting me at 2 p.m. Harumph. The nerve of them!

I try to remember to bring the phone over to the table next to the recliner when I'm napping because it's a pain to try to (a) wake up, (b) get out from under the dogs sleeping on top of me, and (c) make it to the phone on time, but I only remember to do that about 25% of the time because I haven't quite totally reconciled myself to it being OK for me to sleep in the middle of the day.

Today my nap was interrupted not once, but twice. But for a change, I decided to ignore the phone. I don't know why we have such a Pavlovian response to the phone. It rings and no matter what we are doing, or, in the case of our cell phones, where we are or with whom we are currently in the middle of conversing, we must answer that ring.

I groaned when the phone rang and briefly considered tossing the dogs out of my lap and staggering to my feet to get answer it, but then decided that there wasn't anything earthshattering that wouldn't wait until I woke up, and anybody who needed me immediately would leave a message (and I could probably get up in time to pick up the phone during the message anyway). So I let it ring. 1...2...3...4...5... Both times they were hang up calls.

Because I didn't try to get up, I was able to get back to sleep pretty quickly and when I finally woke up (after an hour and a half), and checked the caller ID, they were both soliciter calls. I was very happy I hadn't tried to answer them.

I always feel a little groggy when I wake up, but it feels so good to have slept that I'm never sorry I've taken time out to do it.

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There is a post script to my entry about my problems with the flash viewer. (Of course there is a post script. Does anything with comoputers ever go smoothly?)

I woke up this morning and discovered that the computer had restarted itself during the night. Peggy keeps telling me to turn off the automatic updates, but I never get around to doing it...my guru tells me the world will come to an end if I don't....and actually, I'm embarrassed to turn them off because if I ever have to call the guru to come and help, he'll give me a very hard time for not having the 14,000 updates that I should have.

Anyway, I started the computer again and was relieved to see that this time it didn't wipe out my web connection and that I could still start up Front Page.

But then I decided I would work on the "Dogs of 2008" book today, since I had flash back again.

So I fired up Firefox, went to Lulu.com and found the message that said I needed to download the latest version of flash before it would work.

Arrrggggghhhhhhh!!!!!

I went to Internet Explorer and tried going to Lulu from there and Flash did work with IE.

SO...that having been said, I now know how to get the flash player to work in Firefox, but it seems like it's not worth the hassle to keep uninstalling and reinstalling. If I have to use a site that needs Flash to work, I can just go to Internet Explorer.

But I guess that at least I learned something for all the angst yesterday. And the book is designed and ordered, which was the main reason I needed to solve the problem in the first place. That and the damn putt putt golf game.