I sleep with a CPAP. To give you some idea how bad my sleep apnea is, when my pump went out last fall, the week or so it took to get a new one approved by insurance and delivered by Apria was sufficient time for me to develop hallucinations from a lack of REM sleep.
Nothing trippy, but I'd see cars pulling up in my blind spot that weren't there when I turned my head, or people coming around the corner who weren't there when I looked up. As the line from Fight Club says, everything was a copy of a copy of a copy. Except I didn't have insomnia, I was just borderline on suffocating in the sleep I did get.
Anyway, I thought the power would be restored presently but I was wrong. Corinna's idea was I should get on the bike and ride through the storm to my office and plug in there. But as far as I could see, there was no power, so for all I knew, Waldo was blacked out, too.
It was 4:20 a.m. when the lights came back on, by which time I was faking sleep or trying my best to snore in a sweat on top of the sheets (no juice also meant the fan didn't work), propped up to minimize the collapse of my airway. When my alarm went off a half hour later, I knew there was no way I was making it to work on time.
I probably shouldn't have gone in at all: I never take sick days. It's a hard thing to explain, it's not that I didn't hear my alarm, it's that I couldn't sleep in any meaningful way in the first place. I only missed a week of work when I had a heart attack, so calling in for a day is generally summed up in the five words "explosive diarrhea, I saw blood."
But if I couldn't sleep, at least I could play with my camera. I got a couple of decent shots out the window with long exposures and using the window sill as a tripod.
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