My little blog is a year old now. Celebrate and rejoice!

Many of you weren't expecting this post until tomorrow since the oldest archive post here is from July 25 of last year. Fooled you! (And me.) Seems the first two posts from the Blogger incarnation of this weblog were lost in the move. The actual first Snooze Button Dream post was Thoughts on snooze buttons, posted July 24, 2003. Thusly a blog was born. (I've reproduced that post in the extended entry here, just in case Blogger is still going psycho on my archives.)

As it is Saturday this is about all you will get from me but expect big news tomorrow.

Thoughts on snooze buttons

You set your alarm for the time that you need to get up, yes? Then why is there a need for a snooze button? The alarm goes off, you wake up rudely, you drag yourself out of bed. If you are setting your alarm for the correct time and then using the snooze button you are then late. If you are setting your alarm early in order to use the snooze button without being late then you are trading 9 minutes of actual sleep for 9 minutes of fitfull wierd half sleep and the pleasure of being jarred awake by the alarm more than the target of once per day.

Some snooze buttons give you 9 minutes, some 10. I had an alarm clock that gave 6 minutes for a snooze. I had another that gave 9 minutes for the first snooze then 10 minutes for the following snoozes. Who the heck thought that up? Wouldn't that take extra programming work to set up? Somebody made extra effort so the first time you snooze it is one minute shorter than the next time you snooze. Wierd. Most alarm clocks won't reactivate the alarm if you do the snooze for over an hour. Know your snooze! The repercussions of snooze ignorance could be devastating.

Snooze dreams tend to be the strangest ones you'll ever have and remember. Why are snooze dreams so much easier to remember than regular dreams? I think it's because you're not in a deep sleep - you're still half awake and waiting in fear for the alarm klaxon to return.

The snooze button has an addictive quality. Once you start using it, it's very hard to get out of the habit. I was so bad for a while that I had to move the alarm clock from the nightstand to the dresser so I'd be forced to physically get out of bed to turn it off. Then there was the problem that I was often able to just roll over and go back to sleep with the alarm blaring as it was much easier than getting up to turn off the alarm clock. Marriage solved that little problem. It's possible to go back to sleep despite the alarm but it is not possible to do that through a barrage of elbows and feet.