Scavanger Hunt at 3:30 am

                My wake-up-to-my-morning-alarm-without-waking-up-my-roommate system almost backfired on me last night: my cell phone fell off my bed.

                To help you better understand my predicament, some details are in order.  First, I get up earlier than my roommate, so to not wake her up I set my cell phone on vibrate.  If I put it next to my head I hear it in the morning (unless I wake up before it goes off, which is usually the case) but she doesn’t.  I don’t move much at night; therefore I wasn’t too worried about knocking the cell phone off the bed.  So the system has been working very well.

                Last night was a different.  I went to bed early (because I was tired), but unfortunately I think it might have been a little too early (does 9:30 pm sound too early to you?).  At about 3:30 am I was awake for no reasonable reason – not entirely awake; it was more like half-awake/half-asleep. 

                So there I was, lying there awake, with nothing in particular to do.  Lying awake on your bed in the middle of the night is one of the most boring activities I can think of.  I sighed, turned over – and then was suddenly very awake as I heard a clattering noise followed by  ***CLUNK.*** 

Yes, it was my cell phone.

                Another detail that you need to know is that I have my bed jacked up to the highest rung, which means that my mattress is about 3-1/2 feet above the ground.  I did that on purpose so that we could save floor space by fitting my chest-of-drawers and the refrigerator under my bed.  My headboard is pushed up against the wall with the air-conditioning unit, with one of the long sides going along the wall towards the other end of the room.  My roommate’s desk is at the foot of my bed, and then her bed (perpendicular to mine) goes along the wall with the door.  The whole setup has worked out well, on the whole.

                However, last night I groaned as I realized where my cell phone had fallen.  Of course it didn’t fall beside my bed, near my desk, where I could have easily picked it up.  It fell off the headboard side, which meant it was in the two-inch crack between my bed and the wall.  That crack was not designed with ease of access in mind.  To get to my cell phone I knew I would have to squeeze through the one-foot space between the fridge and my drawers, crawl behind the drawers to the wall, reach around my suitcase (it’s very handy to store things under beds, no?), and hope that the phone was within reach.

                I debated just leaving it there.  Who wants to go crawling around under beds at 3:30 in the morning?  But I knew that I couldn’t ignore it – at 6 o’clock sharp it would go off, and what a din it would make as it vibrated on the linoleum floor.... 

                So I heaved myself out of bed.  After trying (in vain) to see if I could reach the troublemaker by simply moving the set of drawers, I sat back on my heels and contemplated the gymnastics I would have to do to get through the opening.  Somehow I managed to do it – it helped that the refrigerator could move a little bit over, which gave me more space.  Step #1, accomplished!  Then I crawled through the area behind my drawers, over to my suitcase.  Step #2, accomplished!  My suitcase wasn’t hard to move, although I didn’t have much room to work around it and so ended up having to reach over it.  I blindly felt around in the darkness, hoping that it wasn’t so far behind the drawers that I wouldn’t be able to reach it.  Then – victory! – my hand landed on it.

Mission, accomplished!

                Well, not quite…  I still had to reverse my tracks, find a way back out of the whole between the fridge and my drawers, and come out again into the openness of the room.  For some reason it wasn’t as hard to come out as it had been to go in…

                Of course I checked right away to see if my cell phone was still functioning, after that adventure.  Thankfully, it was.  I guess cell phones are tougher than I thought.  To avoid the same mishap twice in one night, I stuck the cell phone back into its “sock,” then safety-pinned the sock to my bottom sheet.  It wasn’t going anywhere in that condition.  

                You might think that after all that excitement I would be able to fall back to sleep quickly.  Nope.  I lay there for about 10 minutes, with thoughts for this blog post running around my head.  :-D