Sleep Different

I've been having trouble sleeping lately. Or more to the point, my sleep has felt not entirely satisfying.

A little context: I've had trouble getting myself to bed "on time" all my adult life. This is partly because I'm easily distracted by projects around my home and often find things to keep me up just a little bit later. It's partly because most of my friends are relative night owls. And it's probably partly because the human body thinks the day is really longer than 24 hours (and electric lighting probably reinforces that feeling).

So I often find myself slipping to going to bed at midnight or 1 am, and then I "turn over a new leaf" and start going to bed at 10:30, and it starts over again.

I usually wake up at 7:30 am on weekdays, and for the last two years I almost never sleep past 9:00 am on weekends, though I lie in bed for another hour or so after that. I'm a very slow riser. Fire alarms have a hard time getting me out of bed (I know from experience).

But lately it's felt even harder to get out of bed, and I feel even drowsier for a few hours after I wake up. It's made it hard to get to the gym, which I usually do first thing in the morning. And I've still got that little tickle in the back of my throat (which Lucy thinks might be mild allergies, and which is getting better). I eventually do feel like my usual self, although perhaps a bit yawnier than usual.

I'm not sure what's going on. I do have a lot of little things I'm juggling lately, plus slightly longer hours at work, which makes life a bit more stressful than usual. But I'm only waking up at night slightly more than normal (that I can remember - and Newton usually makes sure I remember), and getting to bed earlier doesn't seem to help.

So it's pretty annoying. I'm not sure if there's anything I can do to fix it, or if it's just part of a big cyclical thing. Or if it's stress-related or what.

I often wish I were one of those people who could just leap out of bed in the morning. But I'm not. I can do it if I have to, but usually I don't have to. I waste an awful lot of my life lying around in bed.

Yeah, so work has been pretty busy lately. I was there until 8:00 tonight cranking away at cleaning up a bunch of code. I probably overdid it a bit, but since some of the things that needed cleaning were easy to identify and do, I wanted to do it right. Even though it meant doing a lot of menial work to dot my T's and cross my eyes (or something like that).

I was really hungry when I left. I came right home and had dinner while watching Baseball Tonight on ESPN.

Meanwhile, at home I've been doing a lot of chores. I just paid most of my bills and balanced my checkbook for the month. (Yes, I do it every month.) I also mailed off my taxes yesterday. I still have, like, five different things in the queue to do at work, mostly to call places with various questions or to make appointments or to order things. Sometimes I have loads of time to make those calls, but not lately.

Last night I drove up to Borrone where I met John and Anders and John's apparently-not-mythical friend Renee (I'd been beginning to wonder). Anders and I had to explain to Renee that making digs at John is a long-honored pastime among John's friends. John probably would have smacked us except we were all laughing too hard to notice. But John and Anders also recounted some of my more geeky characteristics to Renee; fair's fair. Anyway, that was pretty much my social activity for the week.

Nothing exciting is happening otherwise. I'm contemplating what to do this weekend. There are some book and comic stores having sales which I might hit. And I might head up to see an Athletics game, if they're in town.

Yeah, I know. Contain your enthusiasm.