Fuck Daylight Saving's Time and Trying to Sleep

 It's twelve twenty-four in the morning, and I am awake. 

Beautiful Wife is trying to suggest that I should not be irritated about this because I have been asleep for hours. I have, in fact, been asleep since about six-thirty this past evening; this is true. But I could have slept straight through until morning; this is also true. 

I have also spent the last hour lying in the bed, sleep-mask on and CPAP machine wheezing gently as it did its job, paralytic with exhaustion and praying to Morpheus himself to let me sink back into the deep blackness and weird-ass dreams of REM sleep, while: 

• Secondborn and Firstborn (newly returned with Beautiful Wife from a trip to tour a college) played with the dog, causing him to become loud and snarly in his enthusiasm. 
• My alarm went off to remind me to remind Secondborn to take his meds. (Gentle Reader, I did no more than turn that alarm off and slump right back down on the bed. Fortunately, it's a distinctive ring tone, and Secondborn heard it and took his meds anyway.)
• I got to listen to the thumps and clacks of people closing cabinets and drawers, oven and microwave doors, because nobody in this house knows how to close anything gently enough to be quiet about it.  
• The screen door to the porch closed itself several times in rapid succession, with a gunshot-noise impact each time: Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Actually that may have been the actual door; it's not sitting in its frame quite right, and it takes a bit of effort to get it to latch.
  
• Beautiful Wife hollered up the stairs to ask if the boys wanted scrambled eggs. Note: the bedroom door is at the top of the stairs, the boys' doors to either side.
  
• Beautiful Wife hollered back down the stairs that Firstborn had, in fact, put himself to bed as well. (I dared hope that this would lower the overall volume level. Alas, I hoped in vain.)
• My mother-in-law's two small dogs, barking and yapping, were taken outside to pee. 
• My mother-in-law's two small dogs, barking and yapping and presumably done peeing, were brought back inside and put to bed. 
• Both these trips were accompanied by full-volume -- by which I mean to say loud -- conversations.
  
• The alarm system on this already-loud-and-creaky wooden house loudly proclaimed: "Open: Patio Door!" every time someone opened the door to take dogs out, bring dogs in, or just step outside while they waited for the oven to heat so that they could make cookies at twelve-twenty in the morning because they wanted a snack before bed.
  
• A herd of hippos (I think) performed an impromptu tumbling routine (I think) across the second-floor landing just outside the bedroom door.
• Possibly they were moose.
• They might have been practicing the vault instead; gymnastics is an uncertain science.
  
• Beautiful Wife and Mother-in-Law held some sort of conversation across the ground floor of the house. This did not involve text messages, intercoms, or carrier pigeons; they just talked loudly enough that they could still hear each other in different rooms. 
• Crotchstomper McSnuggles went up and down the stairs several time. The stairs are wooden, and in addition to being creaky they provide a perfect sounding board for the click-click-click-click-click-click of the dogs claws. 

Y'all, I have been awake since six o'clock this morning -- which would have been five o'clock if the goddamned Daylight Saving's Time "spring forward" bullshit hadn't rolled through to confuse the issue. I have spent all weekend trying to get caught up on sleep, an effort which has apparently thrown my body for a complete loop all by itself. I have an amazing amount of shit that I need to catch up on at work this week -- not just like "I'm behind," but like, "I have been covering for another co-worker who was working part time and is now out on bereavement leave while I am keeping the boys on track for school and making myself available to help out my mother-in-law while she's recovering from back surgery and the City Manager's Office has just thrown another project my way despite the fact that it really shouldn't be my area anymore and -- while technically simple -- it's going to take a large amount of labor to implement and also it's one of those things that shouldn't be urgent at all except that it's coming from the City Manager's Office so it automatically gets high priority." 

So yeah, by the time Beautiful Wife and Firstborn got back from touring the college, it was about six o'clock, and I was barely on my feet to greet them properly. I put myself to bed because the alternative was to start drinking and just push through, a course which -- I'm sure you all know -- always ends well and carries no possibility of ill effects. 

It would really have been nice to be going into this week on the back of a solid ten or twelve hours of sleep. And I don't mean to insist that the entire house should come to a complete halt, with nobody moving or making any noise just because I went to bed when my sleep cycle bottomed out. On the other hand, I don't think it's unreasonable to hope for some slight, token level of reduced noise rather than the fucking cacophony I was subjected to instead. At least some kind of attempt at keeping it down? Some mild hint of consideration for the fact that I don't usually go to sleep at six-thirty in the fucking evening and maybe -- maybe -- the fact that I have means that I might really need that sleep?

Fuck it. I'm going into work. The boys are on spring break, and I have no obligation to get them anywhere. Maybe I can catch some shit up.