As I watch the fifth season’s premier of Hell’s Kitchen (with Gordon Ramsay), I see how Gordon treats his 16 hopefuls as they present him with their respective signature dishes.

Starting off on a good note, it ends with a sour note as one of the hopefuls tells Gordon, after throwing out the food that he ate of her plate, “I teach manners too, chef.”

“Excuse me?” Gordon says.

The winner of this season’s show will be enriched with a quarter of a million dollars ($250,000) and a sweet position as head chef of the newly minted Borgata restaurant in Atlantic City.

This weekend was a baby-filled weekend for me. It started off with seeing my friend’s less than 2 year old. He is always so fun to be around, especially now-a-days when he runs around the room and has learned to communicate with adults via baby hand signals. He understands select commands and that evening when we were all there, learned everybody’s name!

The next day, I went over to another friend’s house where I saw their little 2 and a half week old. He was fast asleep and didn’t cry all that much as I busily took some snaps of him. So delicate, so soft, and so quiet. I wonder how he is when he’s awake!

Later that night I went over to my brother’s house where his friend brought over their 4 month old daughter. She was one of the bubbliest babies that I’ve seen in a while. Always smiling, drooling and wanting to know what the adults are doing, she was a joy to play with.

So many of my circle of friends are having their babies now – some even on to their second – that it’s all so very interesting to see our lives go by us. I still remember those good old days when we all hung out on weekends until the wee hours of the morning. No more of that… unless of course, you’re the one with the baby.

Arriving at 9pm, I was quickly taken upstairs to the tenth floor of the building where there were already 5 other people occupying their respective rooms. A quick tour of the floor showed me the shower, bathroom, and my own personal room for the night, complete with an IKEA Pöang chair, and a flatscreen TV with remote.

I decided to take a shower beforehand just so I can get to my usual comfort level. I was to immediately complete several short but detailed surveys which asked various questions about my sleep habits, how I am during the course of a normal day, and the likes. This gave some ample time for my hair to dry as the technician needed dry hair for what was to become a rather unusual experience.

As it is a survey, they need to monitor you as close as they can. And that they did with all the wires attached to practically every space of my face, throat, one on each of my legs, and one on each of my shoulder areas. Looking at myself in the mirror, I looked like a cyborg gone out of control.

Surely a picture was taken, but these are for my eyes only.

I was asked if I was ready to go to sleep or if I wanted to watch some TV. After about 20 minutes of survey answering and 30 minutes of wire attaching, it was already 10:45pm, and I was to be woken up at around 6am. I was ready to go to sleep!

Once tucked into bed, the technician leaves the room and through the intercom system, instructs you to move various parts of your body in succession to ensure the wires are working properly. My chest-bands were apparently not functioning properly so they replaced mine as I layed in bed.

Shortly after all the device were working properly, she instructed me to have a good nights’ sleep.

It’s actually more difficult than I thought to be able to sleep naturally when things are attached to all parts of your face and body. At first when the technician replaced my chest-bands, she told me to relax and asked that I be not too nervous. I didn’t think I was nervous at all, but I suppose my breathing patterns indicated otherwise.

I tried to relax. Really I did. But no matter what I did, I had so many things running through my head that I couldn’t actually go to sleep. Ironic, as I had indicated on one of the surveys that I usually fall asleep within 5 minutes of going to bed. I tossed, I turned, and I couldn’t get my mind clear enough to fall into deep sleep. And then it hit me.

That urge. What was this? An urge to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? But I never go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. At first it wasn’t an urgent matter as I was able to suppress the urge – even though I know this is a bad thing to do – and I was actually falling asleep at one point. But then it hit me, that if I relieved myself and cleared my head with the bright lights, I may have a good chance of falling into a deep sleep, thereby allowing the technicians to do their job.

So I did as I was instructed to do if I wanted to get up in the middle of the night. I called out my technician’s name and she came to my room to disconnect me from the machine.

I came back, made sure that my eyes opened wide in the light to be able to start anew once I crawled into bed. The feeling of satisfaction quickly came upon me as I was able to relax more and eventually fall asleep.

After being woken up at what I suspect to be around 6:15am, I was given another two page survey to fill out. These questions now pertained to how my sleep at the clinic was compared to my typical nights’ sleep. Indeed there were the appropriate questions on whether I woke up more or less than typical, and whether I fell asleep slower or faster than typical.

I filled out the survey and she came to take all the wires off. In order to get better readings, the technician puts a slab of conducting gel to your skin. As I had wires stuck all over my face and head, I had this guck stuck all over. It was time for a shower!

I came back, changed into my clothing, and packed up my bags. The technician told me that it would take about 2 weeks for the results to come back and that they would phone me then to make an appointment to talk with the sleep doctor.

I left the clinic at about 7:04am. Wondering where I could go for breakfast downtown, I drove around to find out that most places were not even open at that time. Trying to google my mind, I tried looking for the closest Tim Horton’s and realized that where I was, there were no Tim Horton’s!

Not knowing where else to go, I started heading for work. Fortunately I remembered the one location of Timmies that just happened to be open. I stopped by, grabbed myself a black coffee and a sausage breakfast sandwich to which I ate with content.

I arrived at work at about 7:45am and that’s when the rest of my day began.