Just a big romantic lug

I've already established my bona fides as a hopeless romantic, but it never hurts to reinforce the point.

Here's the deal...I can sleep just about anywhere, anytime and under just about any circumstances.  I've even slept soundly through gunfire (my bunk was only a few feet behind a 5" 54 Caliber naval gun).  Seriously, so long as I am warm, dry and reasonably well fed, sleep can't be very far off.

Unless there is a television operating within earshot.

As I've mentioned before, I am powerless to look away when a TV is on in the room... no matter how little interest I may have in the content of the current program.  This has been a source of friction between myself and my lovely wife for many years.

You see, when I'm tired I simply climb into bed, and within seconds I am asleep.  Just like that.  But Zahava is apparently wired differently.  She needs to channel surf and do a crossword puzzle or two at the end of her day in order to decompress.  So, if we happen to turn in at the same time, instead of going immediately to sleep... I am inevitably sucked into whatever crap she is watching on the TV.

This wouldn't be so bad if my sweetie would always remember to use the automatic sleep timer feature on our bedroom television.  This handy feature is designed so that you can set the thing to go off after a certain number of minutes... allowing the viewer to go to sleep without fear of leaving the TV (and husband) on all night.

I can't tell you how many times I've gone to bed at 10:00PM, only to find myself hopelessly invested in some pointless 'straight-to-video' movie at 4:45AM... just because Zahava forget to set the timer.  Of course she passed out ten minutes after turning on the TV, leaving me to float helplessly along on a river of horrible late-night programming.

It finally got so bad that I started banishing her to the living-room for her late evening TV fix.  She protested that she couldn't unwind unless she was watching in bed, but grudgingly agreed that it wasn't fair to me if I ended up having to stay up much later than I wanted as a result of her bed-time routine.

And for a while this worked.  I went to bed and once again enjoyed the luxury of diving head first into the dream pool whenever I felt like it.  But it didn't take long for my conscience to catch up with me.  I started lying awake in bed listening to the faint sound of the TV from upstairs... feeling like a selfish heel for banishing my wife from her own bedroom.

So yesterday I brought home a make-up gift for my lovely bride.  I left it casually in the middle of the dining room table so she couldn't help but notice it. 

What did I give her?  I gave her a gift that will allow us to once again co-exist... a gift that will let her do her bed-time decompression session in front of the tube, while keeping me beyond the reach of that oh, so bad CSI dialog.  I got here a set of wireless TV headphones.

I'll bet you didn't know that you can buy a little wireless transmitter that plugs into your television's headphone jack that will broadcast the audio to a set of special headphones so that the person watching TV doesn't bother anyone else around them?  Well gues what?  You can!

Don't say it... I know... I'm just a big romantic lug.  What can I say?