Sleeping in the Guest Room

I am a terrible sick person. When I am sick all I want is to be left alone. I prefer to stay in bed, hidden under the covers, and not emerge until I am recovered. Reading doesn’t appeal to me when I am sick. Writing helps, but I can never do it as well when I am sick. You can probably tell just by reading this.

Once a year, I catch a cold, and this year, it happened a week before our winter vacation. Work is extremely busy so there wasn’t much chance of taking a sick day. I worked a 12-hour day yesterday, the first day I was sick. I take some cold medicine to mitigate the symptoms. For the first time ever, I took Zicam in the slim hope that it would shorten my symptoms, despite my utter lack of faith in the product. And I drank a lot of fluids.

Worried that I’d pass my cold to the rest of the family just before we head on vacation, I spent last night in the guest room. If you have a guest room in your house, it is worth spending a night in it, just to see what your guests experience when they sleep there. Here are some of my observations:

1. There aren’t enough plugs for mobile devices. There is an outlet behind the bed and a clock and light are plugged into it. I had to bring down the mobile dock from my nightstand to plug-in my phone. I hate when there are not enough outlets in hotel rooms. I should fix that in the guest room.

2. The mattress on the bed is much harder than I remembered. The bed in the guest room is a queen-sized bed that used to be our bed before we upgraded.

3. It is dangerously dark with the lights out. You can’t see anything for about the first five minutes until your eyes adjust. Once your eyes adjust, you catch the barest glimmer of light from the window, which is below ground-level in the front. And there is the glint of light off a picture on the stairwell. I should probably put in a night-light.

4. The utility room is right next door. That is where the washer and dryer are located. It is also where the furnace is located. When the heat comes on in the middle of the night, it is pretty loud in the guest room. Fortunately, we don’t have many guests in the winter. I imagine the air conditioner is just as loud down there.

5. There is much more creaking around the guest room than in other parts of the house. Perhaps that is because the guest room is on the lowest level (our house has three levels) and the weight of the entire structure settles upon it. I wouldn’t want to be a little kid sleeping in that dark, creaking guest room.

We’ve never had any complaints about the guest room, but then again, we don’t leave a survey sheet on the nightstand asking for feedback. Looks like I have a few things to add to my to-do list. But I’ll wait until tomorrow. I’ll probably be sleeping down there again tonight, and I might find something new.