Today I can barely hold my head up at work. The obvious solution, I thought, was to relocate the phone to the floor and stretch out beneath my desk. The ringing phone would serve as an adequate alarm clock and, even sleepy, I’m reasonably certain I could operate the voicemail transfer buttons.  A good plan, but flawed; the window is right above my desk. Apparently, this maple wood monstrosity fails to provide the shade I would expect from an average umbrella.

My house, too, has a lot of light. Even with the spiffy dark shades we chose for the walls (my contribution had nothing to with paint brushes or rollers) and lined curtains, our bedroom loft is glaringly bright from the very first cockadoodledoo until almost ten at night. I’m not someone who can sleep in those conditions. And as the human body requires sleep in all four seasons, I was forced to mastermind yet another scheme to catch a few winks during daylight savings.

Enter the head cave.

Head caves are completely portable, made up of a cushy, pliable combination of sheet, quilt, and comforter. The size of the cave depends on the amount of fresh air you want to let in versus sunlight. Side effects include tangled hair and bad breath. But if anyone can figure out how wake up without looking like Medusa’s fire-breathing cousin, please drop a line. My fiance would probably pay you for that kind of assistance.

This past weekend, while other people my age were no doubt meeting exciting new people or (yawn) spending time with their families, I had yet another stroke of, oh, let’s just call it genius. The air-to-darkness ratio in head caves, see, is increasingly difficult to negotiate around the solstice. (More light+more heat=more engineering difficulties). Unwilling to compromise, I constructed a head cave with higher blanket walls with a wider circumference. Voila! The head coliseum.

On a cautionary note, the coliseum requires a good deal of quilt to build, which may leave your partner without. But it’s summer, eh? There’s no real chance of frostbite. You can always tell your bedmate to quit complaining or you’ll drag him/her into the coliseum with you, then loose the ravenous lions.