Counting Sheep: The Nerdy Smoker Method

On the nights before I work and if Mike is home, I take a sleeping pill.  I like my sleep to be guaranteed.  On all the other nights, it doesn't matter how busy my day was or how many hours I was awake, sleep does not come easy.  My brain will not shut off.  My thoughts skip jump from random idea to the next.  I won't go into all the details about what I think about...all I have to say is "I'm a woman" and it makes sense to every single woman reading this.

So....how do I finally shut off my mind?  I have two tricks up my sleeve and they both work because they focus my attention.  Well, actually I have three tricks, but one is sort of creepy so I'm not going to share that one :)

1) Counting cigarettes.  When I worked at the gas station, one of the nightly jobs was to put away all the packs of smokes.  They were loaded up into milk crates and locked in a back room. But, you didn't just grab any handful of packs and chuck them into the crate.  They were put away in the same order, every night, starting on the very left hand shelf.  So, I go through the motions of mentally packing away all those packs of smokes, starting with Export A Silver.  Generally, I start drifting off somewhere between all the different types of DuMaurier and the Benson & Hedges.

I can say right now with all honesty - some of you are going to quit reading the rest of this post out of sheer boredom.  For those of you that make it all the way through, I applaud you.  

2) On nights when I want to fall asleep even faster, but I can't take a sleeping pill, I like to take things to the next level of nerdiness.  Are you ready for this?  I skip count.  Backwards.  From 4500.  By nines.  I told you I was a nerd.  The number nine, and all of its multiples, is a very cool number because it's digits will always add up to nine:

9 x 3 = 27 --> 2 + 7 = 9

9 x 462 = 4158  --> 4 + 1 + 5 + 8 = 18  --> 1 + 8 = 9

So, knowing that multiples of nine always add up to nine, thus begins my mental mathematical journey...

4500, 4491, 4482, 4473, 4464, 4455, 4446....

And that's when the second cool thing appears - if you split these numbers into two groups  (4491 --> 44/91), you'll notice the first two numbers add up to 8.  Once you know what the first two numbers add up to, you know the last two numbers need to add up to equal the difference between the first set and nine OR one of it's multiples.

4+4 = 8 so the next two numbers have to add up to either 10 (to make it equal to 18) or be a 1.

If we jump down to the 4200s, 4 + 2 = 6, so the next two numbers have to add up to either 12 (to make it equal to 18) or 3.

Every so often, I stop and do a spot-check...that is, I add up the digits of whatever number I'm currently on, just to make sure it's still a multiple of nine.  In case anyone is wondering, I have never reached zero. I have made it down into the two thousands, but that's as close as I get.

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I actually just had a bright idea - for those of you that got bored reading all the math stuff, if there are nights when you can't sleep, just open up this post and try re-reading it.  That should knock you out in no time :)


PS - I bet you're all just dying to know what my third trick is, aren't you?!?