Sleep and Dreams

Had trouble sleeping earlier this week. I woke up a couple of times, which I don't usually do. I think I was having some stomach issues, and also I need to get back in the habit of using the CPAP machine. 

Weird, disconnected dreams, too. I was trying to get to some kind of family for dinner, for a holiday where I hadn't had the day off, only all I had was name of the place -- no directions -- and I kept forgetting the name. I had Secondborn with me, except much younger than she is now, and she kept wandering off. Then I got frustrated and went walking off into the pouring rain. (Not so much leaving Secondborn behind as just... she wasn't there anymore.) There was a Kung Fu fight, or at least a brief tussle in there somewhere, too. 

None of it made much sense, which I suppose isn't all that unusual, but my dreams are frequently pretty coherent -- more coherent that this, anyway. I think I'm just back to having a lot of frustrations in my life right now, and not enough spoons to deal with them.

Nope, still recovering...

 Losing Sleep, by Charlotte Sometimes:

Lordy lordy some late nights lately

So, the thing about trying to wrangle applications is that they're frequently, well, recalcitrant. And they frequently need important, unavoidable things like upgrades... that need to be done outside of business hours. This is true even -- hear me out -- even when when what you're upgrading is actually just a test environment, or one set aside for training people where they can't break your business if they make a mistake. 

You might think that those environments should be available for much more casual upgrades, since they don't affect the actual business that goes on in your production environment, and can be refreshed from Production if anything goes wrong. And in an ideal world, you'd be right about that. In actual practice, well, I had a couple of inconveniently late nights last week while trying to get an incredibly recalcitrant training environment to to fully upgrade so that we can start User Acceptance Testing over there before we just upgrade the production environment and commit our fate to the merciless hands of the Computer Gods. 

This would be a great opportunity for overtime, but here at the new job I'm on salary. Which is fine, and maybe even better, because not only am I getting paid more in general, if I have to (hypothetically) put in four hours on a failed upgrade Thursday Night and another four hours on a partially-successful upgrade Friday night, I can bloody well sleep in on Friday morning and again on, say, the following Monday. I need to inform my co-workers so they know what to expect in terms of when I'm actually conscious, but otherwise nobody cares. (And in fact -- kudos to the new job -- they encourage it.) 

I would love to be responsible for a piece of software that was well-documented, well-maintained, and properly tested for quality. This one is... not that, but that's part of the reason it's worth paying me this much to maintain it. 

On a possibly-related note, I woke up Saturday morning after a dream in which Vincent Price -- that bastard -- was in a wheelchair and trying to break open the bathroom door while I was getting into the shower, so that he could feed me to the marsh people. The marsh people had apparently lived here years ago, and been subject to cruel and horrible experiments; the one I was avoiding introduced itself as having been made from six other marsh people, and looked like a cross between a starfish and a stingray. So if I ever see Vincent Price in a wheelchair again, I'm going to murder him on the spot in self-defense. 

BUT THAT ASIDE, life is pretty good. I keep forgetting that Firstborn is no longer living with us, which is weird but otherwise fine; we've put Secondborn into some math tutoring because apparently middle school has taught him that it's both terrible and useless; the dog has very strong opinions about where we should go when we do walkies; and I'm running three different D&D games which I'm enjoying the hell out of in three different ways. 

If I get my sleep schedule back under control, I'll be unstoppable. 

Here's to you, my friends, being -- or becoming -- unstoppable too.

Thursday Motivational

All right, my friends. It's Thursday. It's time to rise up and...

...You know, on second thought, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a good day to snuggle back down. Bury yourself in pets and nap on the couch. Hide under your blankets and go back to sleep. Make a pillow fort and just lie in there and read. Fuck it. Life's too short.

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(Fell asleep with voice to text on...)

Sleep is my friend

So after a week or more of thinking, "I really ought to get to sleep earlier," I finally put myself down right after we finished eating dinner -- well, not right after, but as soon as possible after. That was about seven-thirty, I think. 

I slept straight through to six-forty this morning. 

So, call that about eleven hours. And I feel much better for it. Like, I think I finally got that system reset that my body's been wanting. I'm still yawning, of course -- I haven't been awake that long, after all -- but moving, feeling, doing things? All feel like less of a struggle. 

Writing progress has been minimal this week. I had an idea for one of the D&D stories, but it's too far out on the timeline for me do anything with it right now. I may just pass it back to my DM to play with. And I need to get back to work on Shadow Academy, which is currently still just a bunch of character sketches and an intro scene; I need to get the story going. 

Work is still busy and looks like to get busier for the next several months, but there's not much to do there except ride the wave and learn as much as I can; we're going to need it. 

Oh, yeah: and get sleep. Sleep is my friend.

One interesting side-effect of getting that much sleep: I remember my dreams, and my dreams were weird. Like, I had taken a travel detour to watch a zombie movie, and that movie was also ground zero for a zombie outbreak. A lot of avoiding zombies, blocking their way, and getting out of the theater. So either my brain is deeply recursive, or it's very confused. Possibly it's a reaction to our idiot governor reopening the state before we're full vaccinated. Or the whole thing was a metaphor for this project at work...

Nothing today...

I'm having another one of those weeks where I'm pushing too hard, so consequently I'm tired, so naturally I try to push harder. 

You'd think after this many years, I'd know that doesn't work. 

So, yeah, nothing really for today. 

Working from home is hellishly distracting (especially this morning), I'm losing track of time/which day of the week it is (possibly because of trying to work from home), and I really need to quit trying to do things and go to bed early (possibly with earplugs, because if I go down before everyone else they tend wake me back up by being loud). None of that is insurmountable, but it's frustrating. 

Right then: back to trying to work on the thing I've been trying to work on since 8:00 this morning.

Comes the Crash

I woke up yesterday morning and then realized that I just couldn't. Not illness, I don't think -- just exhaustion. It's the end of the semester for both the boys (who I think officially finish next week) and Beautiful Wife, who turned in the last of her grading yesterday. That's always a rough time of year, but of course we've got the soft quarantine and economic collapse coming now; plus I kept trying to work on things after the boys went to bed. And I had a couple of things earlier in the week that made for some longer-than-usual workdays.

I should know better by now.

Anyway I called in, went back to bed for half the day, and then worked the other half from home to keep everything going at work. My timer suggests that I slept for about ten and a half hours, all told. Got a little less sleep last night than I should have, but it was solid and I feel a lot better.

I want to start picking the fictions up again on here -- or at least one of them. (If you've got a preference between Into The Black and Dark Armor, let me know in the comments. No promises, though.)

More than that, though I want to go back to a longer writing project and try to really focus on it -- as in set aside some time each night and forbid interruptions. Unfortunately, that requires getting everybody back on a real schedule, and that isn't going to be easy. (We're close, but it's slipped from 8:30 bedtime to a 9:30 bedtime. It's hard to explain why they have to get up at 6:30 in the morning if they don't have to go anywhere and don't really settle in for their school work until about 8:00.)

So, yeah, sleep: sleep is good. I may still run out of energy after lunch, but I'm feeling so much better this morning. Sleep is good.

Dreams

So, we finished the Saturday Night DnD game and I slept for about ten hours, deep enough to have a lot of weird dreams. (The game was still going on, but we'd moved to some sort of con and were now playing with like three other groups; we were packing to leave the con only somehow the hotel staff had managed to lose all the souvenirs I'd bought for my family; I was back at the school of my old Kung Fu Sifu [and, again, having trouble keeping up with my stuff]...)

I think I needed that.

I'm writing this on Sunday morning, and today is basically going to be Clean All The Things/Run All The Laundry day, so off we go with that. Wish us (retroactive) luck!

A Brief Observation On The Subject Of Life's Little Pleasures

Of all life's pleasures -- good food, good drink, good company after being alone, solitude after too much company, a puzzle solved, the warm glow of exercise -- sleep is best.

I love sleep.

I slept!

I took some melatonin and went to bed a bit before 10:00 last night, and proceeded to actually... what do they call that... Oh, right: sleep.

That makes this morning the first time in maybe as much as a month that I've woken up and not still felt tired.

As perverse as it seems, I think I actually get more done when I set my sights lower.

I need to do more of this.

And yeah, none of this is new -- I've probably published some version of this same shocking, radical discovery at least four times over the last couple of years on the Blog o' Doom here alone -- but it keeps coming as a surprise, at least on a visceral this-is-how-it-actually-feels level, and I feel like maybe if I write it down again, this time the lesson will finally stick with me.

It never seems to work like that, but I keep trying anyway.

Sleep, Glorious Sleep

I've spent this week focusing on one thing: sleep. It hasn't always been successful, but I have at least made a serious effort to go to sleep early every night this week. And finally, this morning, I woke up at about 5:00 in the morning, which is to say a good forty-five minutes before my alarm was set to go off. In other words, after four days of going to bed as early as I could manage, I am finally rested enough to wake up on my own.

I'm also finally rested enough to have dreams, though I don't remember enough of the details of last night's phantasmagoria to be worth recounting.

It makes a huge and very tangible difference. My memory is much more reliable, my thinking is more flexible, and I suspect (I haven't tried it, yet) my writing is going to be vastly better, not to mention easier. I actually find all this a bit worrisome, as it says pretty clearly that I've spent the last... three months, maybe four... being massively, disablingly sleep-deprived.

Even without trying to write (and I'm still not sure if I'm ready to re-embark on any of my longer projects yet), I have a very great deal of work to do. But at least I feel like I can actually focus when I sit down to do it.