Snow Trip: Days 10-11

So... the blogging into a text file during ski trip never quite happened; I was having too much fun, to be honest. I did end up going skiing, despite the concerns of one of my RAs. He actually sent me an e-mail the morning before we left, saying something along the lines of "the high altitude and your sleep schedule won't mix well; it'd probably be too dangerous for you to ski". But I did, and I'm fine, and it was so much fun!

Unfortunately, my sleep schedule was blown to bits. Here's what happened, and then we'll see how many pieces I have to pick up.

Day 10.2
We left sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 pm. We pull into a rest stop for dinner at 6:15; we're given about 45 minutes on the ground. I buy my food in a hurry, and then conk out at 6:30 against the wall in a booth in a fast food place. It's the first time on this schedule that I've napped outside of the dorm (which usually means my bed or a lounge sofa). It takes me a little longer than my usual two or so minutes to fall asleep, but otherwise, that nap was fine.

We arrive in front of the house in Tahoe at 10:20 pm, but don't actually start unloading until fifteen minutes later, I'm told, because the RA who'd gone to get the keys hadn't gotten there yet. I take my nap right on schedule at 10:30, and am the last one off the bus at a little before 10:50 (with the friend upon whose shoulder I was sleeping). That was uneventful; so far so good.

Day 11
Trouble, in the form of oversleeping, strikes. I sleep on a couch at 2:30 am. I wake up around 5:00. Two hours of oversleep! Two hours! I panic when I can't find my phone, but a controlled panic, because everyone else is asleep. I do work, I think, with the intention of calling my phone from someone else's phone when people start waking up to go ski. My phone sounds muffledly (is that a word?) at 6:20; turns out, it had slipped between the cushions of the couch. That was probably why I overslept, though at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if I started sleeping through alarms.

I sleep at 6:30 anyhow, because accustoming oneself to a pattern is important. I am woken up a minute or two early by the convening of skiers in the kitchen a few feet away. I turn off the alarms and change into ski gear.

The next nap is tricky, because by 10:30, we would already have completed rentals and hit the slopes with all our gear. Fortunately the timing worked out exactly; the gondola ride up to the top of the mountain is 17 minutes long, which served admirably for my noon block nap. I'm surprised at how quickly I can fall asleep in ski boots in midair.

I took it easy this time; though flying down the slopes at breakneck speeds is great fun, actually breaking my neck is not. I didn't want to get hit by a wave of tiredness on the mountain and have to fight it coming down. Instead of taking blues and blacks as I would normally have done, I taught two of my friends how to ski, and we stuck to greens and blues. (That was an adventure in itself. One of them took 2/3 of a slope on his belly.)

The 2:30 nap happened in the ski lodge, since it was around lunchtime anyhow. I can fall asleep in noisy crowded rooms on hard tables in minutes! Then again, I can also fall asleep standing up on the subway, so it is perhaps not such an accomplishment.

Day 11 to be continued...

Short term memory tests (Day 13)
Numbers: 12.13
Letters: 15
Words: 29

It doesn't seem as though the two day hiatus has had any real effect on my scores. The letters one is surprisingly high, but that doesn't seem terribly significant.