Thoughts about sleep

So, I was thinking that if my night when I need to be able to fall asleep and get up early the next morning and be well rested and all, is Wednesday night, then Thursday night is about the most inopportune time for me to get the majority of my exercise for the week. Of course, I'm not really all the confident that exercise helps me sleep better, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't hurt. My spring semester my senior year of high school I played lacrosse. That was the only time I did a sport in high school, and the only time in the last 8 years or so that I got large amounts of regular exercise. I know I slept like a rock that semester and it took me approximately 1 second to go to sleep. I don't really know if that was due to the exercise, the extremely regular schedule, or the fact that I never seemed to get more than 7 hours of sleep so I was always tired. It was probably a combination of them all. However, I did curse the exercise because it caused bad cramps which interfered with my sleeping. Every morning that semester between 1am and 3am I would wake up with horrible leg cramps. I would leap out of bed and walk them out for a minute or two and fall back into bed and be asleep almost immediately. So I've never been terribly keen on the idea of exercise to help me sleep better. Last night I think I slept okay, the problem was that I couldn't fall asleep until midnight or so and I had to be up and awake for an 8am class. It is amazing to me what the difference between 7 and 8 hours of sleep will do for me. I don't put a whole lot of stock in that whole "sleep cycle" thing people talk about. Sure, sometimes it's easier to get up than other times, but the amount of time I can stay awake and pay attention during the day seems to be a simple linear combination of the amount of sleep I've gotten in the two previous nights.

Anyhow, since I should be regularly getting a significant amount more exercise Thursday nights this semester than any other time, I'm going to try to see if I notice any regular weekly patterns in how well I sleep.

Recipe: Alex's Peanutbutter Cookies

1/2 cup peanutbutter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter
1.5 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup dark sugar

Research log so far

Thursday, January 23 -- First meeting with Haskell -- 1 hour
Tuesday, January 28 -- Started trying to repeat my simulations from the summer in Matlab -- 2 hours
Thursday, January 30 -- Second meeting with Haskell -- 1 hour

So since I am only doing one unit of research (I believe) I'm really only expected to log 3-4 hours a week. However, if 1/3 to 1/4 of that time is meetings with Haskell, I'm really not going to have a very satisfying research experience, nor am I going to have much time to get stuff done.

Conclusion:

There are not enough people in Contra Dancing. It makes dancing with a new person every time rather difficult. I'm going to need to start dancing as the guy more so that I can dance with more different partners before I start running into problems.