...city livin...

Our little apartment has 12 foot high ceilings.

It's awesome. It makes 670 square feet seem so much bigger.

As an added bonus, I don't hit the ceiling when I get excited and jump up and down. And it's also great for P90X-ing, as the program also requires lots of hopping.

Additionally, one entire wall of our apartment has floor to ceiling windows. Pretty cool. Gives us a great view of some offices directly across the street from us. I like to have staredowns with some employees that work at the "chaotic office" as I have coined it. The place looks so unorganized that it makes me cringe, even from afar.

While these windows are really quite pretty, they also provide us with a few challenges. I often forget when I open the shades to let in sunlight (and initiate starting contests), that I'm also opening our apartment up to anyone else who has eyes and happens to glance upwards. Sometimes I have fun peering down at tour groups who come to take pictures of our building, and the one right across the street, the Monadnock. Overall, I don't mind having the window shades open, and have learned pretty quickly that a bathrobe is my new best friend when getting from the bathroom to the bedroom after showers.

Night, however, is an entirely different story. We have window shades for all of our windows, which I typically close at night. Even with everything "covered," we still get a heck of a lot of light in our apartment. Especially our bedroom. For some reason, when the light filters in through the shades, it makes cool strobe like beams of light all across our ceiling and bed.

While the strobes are pretty nifty looking, they make it hard to fall asleep. I'm already battling with the sounds of the El, trucks driving by, random car horns (people LOVE their horns here), and the constant karaoke from the bar located IN our apartment building...so the last thing I really want is beams of light alllllll over.

My first thought is that I need to get an eye-mask. While I've always thought they were vaguely princess-y and pretentious looking, I thought I might be willing to try one out. When I happened across one in the dollar bins at Target, I knew it was destiny.

Also, I think it's important to note that when I was discussing this with Tim, I had the genius idea for Apple to create the imask. This would be a 3d sort of apparatus, made cool in a way that only Apple can. (You heard it here first people) To this Tim replied, Apple should make iglasses! To which I replied, duh, eyeglasses already exists.

Anyway. Last night as I was laying in bed, unable to sleep because of the bright lights, I was contemplating two thoughts.

1. Transform our bedroom into a small, posh nightclub with excessive strobe lights. And obviously make some money on the side.

2. Try out my eye-mask for the first time.

I opted for #2. Even though it felt like something was constricting my face, and I had fears of punching Tim in my sleep because I couldn't see anything, it worked out pretty well. I'm not sure if I'll continue use of the mask, because when I woke up, it was no longer on my face, but on the floor.

Maybe if I had a cool one like this, I would keep it on longer.

Any alternative ideas for blocking out light? Besides the obvious of spending hundreds of dollars on curtains?