I’ve come to sleep better in the truck than in my own bed. It probably has something to do with the fact that we don’t travel with our dogs, so their sonic farts and efforts to alert the entire universe when a train goes by are fruitless. Our dogs are so old, they ate table scraps from the Last Supper. We adopted the mode of letting them do whatever they want to do, because they’re old, assuming they would die soon and the bad habits would die with them. That was five years ago, and now they’re both so deaf they can’t hear themselves howling at the train. They’ve also permanently damaged the olfactory senses of anyone who regularly sleeps within a half-mile radius of them with nighttime farts that smell so bad they can raise a tired trucker from a dead sleep.
[youtube 2ADtipIPiGU nolink]
When we idle the truck, it’s like sleeping inside a giant, purring cat. Especially with the beefy motor in the Precious. She bubbles and purrs and pops me right to sleep, within minutes of my head hitting the pillow. It’s truly the best “sleep sound” I have.
I’m not so easily led to slumber when we’re not idling. I have a hard time sleeping when people are yelling at one another, or catching a screaming third, or just generally being assy at night, when decent people are trying to sleep. I started using one of the “sleep sound” apps on my phone, and finally settled on the “rain on tin roof” as my favorite sleep-inducing noise. It sounds just like rain on the roof of our farmhouse (and the truck), but forgoes the howling dogs and rancid smells of home.
Having a sleep sound is great, unless your sleep sound happens to be rain and you need to be awake and alert and it happens to be raining. As much as I enjoy the benefit of being able to sleep better, I’ve noticed a decided drawback to having rain as a sleep inducer.
We had a corporate meeting this week, and it was raining when we were getting ready to leave. George was just slightly nervous (not about the meeting – he doesn’t get nervous about meetings, he gets nervous about what I might say during the meetings).
