That'll wake you up

As you should all know by now, I have trouble sleeping. Sometimes the lack of sleep will pile up to a point where I fall asleep whenever / wherever I happen to be. This is usually at home with the lights / TV / CD / whatever still on.

If I feel tired I'll turn all that off and turn in to try to sleep. If not, I try to do something to tire myself out. And in the cases where it is my mind keeping me up, too many thoughts racing around, I'll turn on the TV because as we all know turning on a TV will turn off the brain. The "Sleep" feature on TVs is a great thing. (That's the feature where it turns itself off after a set amount of time.) I'll the timer for when I should be asleep and let it, and myself, go. If I am still awake when the set turns off I'll either reset it or try something else.

A few days ago I fell asleep like that, but apparently I left a candle burning as well. It was one of those supermarket glass candles, sometimes known as a seven-day or advent candle. There wasn't much left in this one.

So around 5AM I was woken up by a rather loud bang. It didn't take long to figure out where the noise came from. While the candle was burning the last of its wax the flame was burning directly on the bottom of the jar. This caused the glass to overheat and eventually explode.

I got up and checked around. The candle had gone out as the jar exploded. There were no flames anywhere. There wasn't even any wax anywhere, not even where the candle had been standing. Apparently it had waited until the flame had burned the last drop of wax before exploding. Very considerate I think.

Since the glass was confined to one small (and safe) area, I went back to bed and waited until I was fully awake in the morning before cleaning it up.

Usually I stick to tea lights if the candle could be burning after I fall asleep, you don't have to worry about the metal cup, and this was a good reminder of why.

But, all in all, I still got a good night's sleep that night. One of only two that I have gotten in the past couple of weeks.