Monday, February 27, 2006

Excessively Sleepy


I left the office around midnight, and it's 12:20 AM now. One of the many things I like about working Saturday or Sunday night is that I can park right next to the employee entrance instead of across the street from the other end of the building. Cuts my commute by nearly 2/3rds.

My total stint at the office was about 6 1/2 hours, maybe a little longer, but not all that time was spent working. First I ate my tuna sub, and at the end I caught up with my FeedBlitz blogs, clicking directly from the links in the emails instead of from Outpost as I usually do. This is because clicking from the email at home opens the blogs in AOL, and I'd reather read them in Netscape or real IE, instead of AOL's IE Lite. But from work I was clicking from emails in the AOL email web client, and with the T1 line (or whatever it is), each page loaded in a fraction of the time it would have taken using my dial-up at home. Until tonight, I didn't even know that Jod(i) had music on her blog.

In between the sandwich and the FeedBlitz, I was less productive than I wanted to be. I was so sleepy, especially early in the evening, that I spent an hour or two proving to myself that a correction someone asked for was valid. It shouldn't have taken half that long. After that, I worked on spreadsheets for 1/5 and 1/20 - and two hours in, caught myself having copied numbers from 1/20 into the 1/5 one. So of course I had to go back and check every item in both spreadsheets against the source files.

All this means that I didn't get to the other three tasks I was hoping to have done by tomorrow morning. Fortunately, one of those is a five-minute job, when I'm awake. The others can be done a little later, if absolutely necessary, but I hope it won't come to that.

Am I doing too much? Am I not taking care of myself? Yes to the first question, but what choice do I have? I can't give up the work, and I won't give up the blogging. There really isn't anything else I do, aside from church, and the occasional shopping. John and I bought a new couch, to replace the one that's tearing, and which I've been sleeping on because of my snoring. It'll be ready in eight weeks. We picked it out three or four weeks ago, but it took us this long to both have the time and motivation to go back and choose the fabric and pay.

And yes, I'm trying to be good. I drank a lot of water today, in addition to the diet cola and ice tea. It probably isn't enough, but it's more than I've been drinking. I'm trying to eat stuff like Subway and Healthy Choice meals until I work out a real plan for what I should eat. It'll be hard to give up Atkins as the default diet (when I diet), but that worked better when I was younger and had a gall bladder. I'm taking my diuretic and my potassium and magnesium, and using prescription skin cream on my increasingly leathery leg. It mostly isn't hurting now, aside from my banged-up, arthritic knee, but it's still red and itchy and irritated, and nothing works to really calm it down. It's visibly less swollen, and no longer feels like a banana about to pop its skin. That's the best I can say for it. And no, you can't see it. Not tonight.

Time to wash my hair and go to bed. Good night, folks.

Karen

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would it be unthinkable to blog four nights a week, instead of seven? I'm always amazed that you haven't collapsed in exhaustion yet. You do too much, and your health can't help but suffer. As Dawn says, be well.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I think you are doing too much. The hours late at night probably work against you too, even if you are catching up during the day. You need some rest, a break. Blogging is a habit, too! Good or bad, a habit. I struggle with it, too. Hate to give up what I do because I enjoy doing all of it, but there are only so many hours in the day. Even machines have to shut down for repairs. Our copy machine at school will take up to ten minutes, at some pre-programmed time, and not copy anything, no matter how many teachers are in line waiting for it. It's "cleaning." We can't see what it's doing, but it's cleaning inside. Sometimes we need to take time to "clean inside." If a copy machine can do it at work, then I suppose I can too! Next time I need a break, I'm going to say "I'm cleaning!" Do you have scheduled periods of "cleaning" time in your day?