Noises in the Night

I'm lucky to live in a pretty peaceful neighborhood, all things considered. I think using the word "quiet" would be a stretch, but overall I'm really grateful to live where I do and know that when I come home that I'll be able to sleep. It's pretty sheltered back here from a lot of the typical noise that one might hear in a big city. In any new living situation, it takes some time to become accustomed to the little noises that makes a house its own. At home those noises were usually a result of something my cat was doing, but here those little noises are due to a number of things. Random car alarms sounding in the night, someone deciding to park out on the street at 4am with the radio blaring as loud as possible, something that sounds like dripping water but isn't, and many days very early in the morning, cats on the roof. None of these things are severe enough to keep me awake for any great length of time, but they do have me waking up more often. In fact, as I reach over to press the light button on my little travel alarm clock, my internal dialogue sounds a little like this: It's 3 am/I think I have to go to the bathroom/but it's cold if I get out of my bed/I'm too lazy to go all the way downstairs/my roommate's alarm is going to go off in 3 hours/I think I can make it 'til then...

This usually results in me getting out of bed anyway, and then sleeping for a few more hours until the alarm clock madness begins. First I hear her alarm, then my alarm, then usually my snooze, then my phone as a back up, then snooze again, etc. We have enough alarms in this place to wake up 10 people, but I'm extra paranoid lately since I overslept and was 15 minutes late to my Saturday class a few weeks ago and I have a new class 3 days a week that begins at 8am.

Last night the light switch in the kitchen stopped working, a common occurrence I've been told, but this resulted in Ita coming in at about 10pm with a big roll of packing tape and trying to tape it flat against the wall so it would stay off. We thought she was successful and went to bed as usual a little later. I heard some noises and hit the clock at 2am, and wouldn't you know, Ita was back downstairs working on the switch since evidently she had gotten up to take the dog out and seen the light back on in the middle of the night. I learned this morning that she had given up and just turned off the breaker, so when I went downstairs this morning there was no power at all anywhere. Luckily by 6:45 it's pretty light out now so I was able to see, but I didn't know where the breaker switch was so I just dragged the electric kettle upstairs to my bedroom and plug it so I could make my coffee.

By the time I got home from class, she already had an electrician here repairing the switch and she also showed me how to turn the power on/off should something like that happen again. I wanted to ask her about my eggs and yogurt and other perishables in the refrigerator, since obviously that is connected to the power source downstairs, but I'm not so good at cracking jokes in Spanish. :)
It's all pretty amusing to me, but I wonder why I've been so tired lately?