Sleep. I need eight hours of sleep a night. That’s usually fine—but when Ray and I stumble upon a compelling series, it’s much easier to forgo sleep than to exercise a little discipline and go to bed at 10:30 or 11 instead of 12:30 or 1.

I tend to do better with a 10:30–6:30 (or 7) sleeping routine, but I’m the first to jump on the bandwagon of just one more episode! when I’m engaged in whatever drama is playing late at night. After all, Ray and I are cozy in bed. It’s warm and comfortable, and the shows we watch are often filled with intrigue and cliffhangers at the end of every episode.

Ray dozes off and on, but I tend to watch until I drop—or until my own dozing makes me realize I’m missing major parts of the storyline. At that point, amid Ray’s contented snores, I’ll finally reach over and click off the remote.

Ray is no help at all. When I say we should go to sleep, he routinely says, “We can just sleep a little later.” Sometimes we do—but not always. There are mornings when we need to be up at a reasonable hour for work, or to head into LA on the train for church, which means leaving our place at 6:45 a.m. to arrive in Hollywood by 9:30. Or there’s the hope of carving out a little early-morning time to write my daily blog or work on my current work-in-progress. Those late-night hours wipe out that possibility for sure.

So what to do? Exercise some discipline, with only occasional dives into really late-night viewing. Surely that would be the best of both worlds. But is that even possible once we’re cozy in bed and a cliffhanger arrives?

It’s worth trying, I suppose—but I think we all know what will really happen.