One of the side-effects of sleep-deprivation is falling asleep in strange places. I'm not talking about slightly inconvenient places, like when I'm sitting in the front row of my fluid mechanics class, doing homework at the desk in my room, or sitting in front of this lovely Hewlett Packard. No, those are such common places for me to sleep that I now consider them "bed". I'm referring to situations such as:

• In Portugal, I actually slept for about half an hour on the battlement of a castle. (Don't worry, it's safer than you'd think - the surface of the battlement was much larger than it looked from the ground, and my friend Gulli was watching over me the whole time.) Incidentally, I was hugging half a melon as I slept. Gulli was kind enough to provide proof of this.

• In Sweden, I fell asleep on a train (the first of many I had to take that day to get to Germany) and missed my stop, thereby missing the connecting train. But it was ok - by taking two other trains and a ferry, I was able to catch up to the following connecting train and I made it to Germany on time.

• To get from Paris to Los Angeles this August, I had to change planes in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I arrived in SF just as the city suffered a major power outage and all the flights were cancelled for the remainder of the day. Yes, I spent the night sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco International Airport. But it was nice - the floor was carpeted.

• I was using an electron microscope for an engineering laboratory course while the prof was standing right next to me. I dozed off while looking at the specimen only to be awakened by the sound of his voice giving me instructions.

• Two other students and I were having breakfast with a recruiter from Boeing (where I had applied for a summer internship) and I dozed off while he was talking (hey, don't blame me - it was a 7:00 AM breakfast, and I had been awake all night doing fluid mechanics homework). Either he didn't notice or he is an incredibly polite man.

• After having stayed awake all night writing HTML, I dozed off for just a second when I was taking notes in my differential equations class. When I looked down at my notebook, I noticed that I had written <i> beside an equation.

• Freshman year, Kip Thorne gave us a lecture about time travel. The few minutes during which I was awake were fascinating.

• In February, Stephen Hawking gave us a lecture about life in the universe. I was only awake for the first half of it. It's true that speech synthesizers aren't known for their ability to produce lively sounds, but what kind of crazy person would let themselves go to sleep during a talk by Stephen Hawking?

• I fell asleep for 15 minutes during a math midterm freshman year. I passed it anyway.

• I fell asleep for a couple hours during an economics midterm a couple years ago. Fortunately, the prof let me work overtime without penalty.

• While waiting for someone (who was very late) on a bench in downtown Seattle I slept sitting up for over an hour. Luckily I was still wearing my purse when I woke up.

• It's easy to fall asleep on the public busses in Seattle and usually I wake up before I reach my stop. A few times I ended up one or two miles away from my house. Once I ended up in a different city.

• Earlier this month (March) I fell asleep while playing the piano. Another student saw me slumped over the piano and worriedly asked me if I was ok.

• Once during my high school years I was talking on the phone to someone named John who was telling me a long story from the Bible. I fell asleep and evidently he spent a few minutes yelling my name to get me to wake up. When I woke up, he started the story over.

• After my high school's senior prom, my date and I played Scrabble (pitiful, yes, I know). I fell asleep during each of his turns. I won.

• One week ago I was riding in a friend's car and we started talking about tires. I dozed off and awakened to hear myself saying "I already have links to each of your tires on my home page."

• I was really tired once while taking a shower. I sat down on the tile floor and awoke an hour later with the water still pouring down on me.

• Once I fell asleep between bites while eating dinner. Fortunately, my head fell just to the right of my plate (I was having mashed potatoes, so I guess it would've felt kind of neat to fall right on my plate, but I didn't).

Note: a few people have written to me about "funny" incidents where they've fallen asleep while driving. I don't think it's funny at all to put other people's lives in danger.