You know when it’s the first cold night of the fall and you jump into bed and curl up under the duvet and wait until the warmth takes over? But then it doesn’t? The other night was that night, (September 2nd, people!!) and I got into bed with the same night clothes I’ve been wearing all summer, a short nightie and undies. I don’t understand enough about aerodynamics or anatomy to understand why I could NOT warm up under a lovely, fluffy duvet. This is the same duvet I’ve been shoving to the end of the bed all summer, occasionally sticking a leg under it if I get a slight chill.
I lay there for upwards of an hour, squirming into different positions, pulling my nightie down as far as I could, pulling my legs up to my chest, anything. I imagined getting up and putting on my flannelette pyjamas and how warm they’d be, but the idea of the cold floor on my bare feet kept me under the covers.
I have friends who have a strict policy about when to turn on the furnace in the fall. They say, “we don’t put the heat on before October 15th”, or maybe it’s November 1st for some of my more survivalist-inclined or parsimonious friends. I’m pretty lenient about this. I figure, if it’s cold, I’ll put the G**D***** heat on and that’s that. But September 2nd?? No. No way. UH, UH! Not happening. That would be like declaring the start of winter or something. So, that option didn’t even occur to me. I figured, yeah, it’s cold, but it’s just me; I obviously have some kind of weird condition which prevents me from getting warm under a fluffy duvet unless I have flannelette pj’s on.
Finally, I got up and turned on the light, which made Buster get up in his crate and look at me, bleary-eyed, like, “What’s up? time to get up?” and then flop back down and back to sleep in seconds. He wasn’t feeling the cold. I rifled through my drawers to find my pj’s with the polar bears on them and put them on, shivering as I did so. I went to the bathroom for a preventative pee, congratulating myself on my foresight, and then jumped back into bed.
I lay there for awhile, feeling the added warmth from the flannelette seeping into me. Ahh, so nice!
Suddenly I became aware of my cold feet. If there’s one thing guaranteed to keep me awake, it’s cold feet. I groaned. Did I actually have to get up and get my wool socks on?? No, that was a WINTER thing. I wear wool socks to bed from November to May, almost without exception. But in September, I don’t wear socks to bed. It’s not done! For awhile I monitored the temperature of my feet. Were they getting warmer? No? Yes? So hard to tell. I finally took one of my extra pillows and put it over my feet under the covers, and felt myself almost immediately relax. YES! This was going to work. I pulled the duvet over my head as an extra measure.
Two hours later I woke up, sweating and gasping, and started throwing my covers off, including the foot pillow. Symptoms of my weird condition include hot flashes…
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