Wow, sleep (redux)

As regular readers will recall, a few weeks ago I ended up taking an extended nap, followed by a serious night of sleep, totalling about 16 hours of slumber.

Last night, I did it again.

Just about all the way home yesterday--the drive from Fargo being about 2.5 hours to the border, and just over another hour from the border home--I was thinking about how tired I was. Not that I didn't sleep while I was on the road. I just had to get up earlier than is usually comfortable to fully enjoy my complimentary breakfast (see previous posts) before hitting the road.

I had planned to hang about in ND for a while, to have a serious late lunch or early supper at a Mexican restaurant in Grand Forks. But by the time I got to Grand Forks, I decided I just wanted to go home. So in the end, I was home by about 3:15. I picked up a little (okay, a lot of) food on the way home, ate, and was ready for a nap by 4pm. When I woke up, it was about 8pm, and my choices were to get up and risk being up all night, or staying in bed. Guess what I decided to do.

I did spend a couple of hours reading. I had finished Jim Butcher's White Night on the road, so I started the next (most recent) book, Small Favor. I don't know what I'm going to do when I run out of these books. I'll have to go back to Janet Evanovich or something. Anyway, around 10pm, I decided it was time to go back to sleep. So I did.

Clock radio woke me up about 7:55, as usual, but I decided to snooze and doze for a while longer. But I got up in time to watch Celebrity Poker at 10am. So I've had some sleep. Enough that now, approaching 4pm, I don't feel like I need a nap. So I guess this is &deity;'s way of telling me to do something about the fruitflies which have taken over my apartment in my absence.

On that, I've broken out a fruitfly trap from Lee Valley, hoping that will do the job. Since my make-shift one (I pounded some holes into the plastic lid of a glass spice jar and threw in some warm water, oatmeal, and a little yeast and sugar to start the fermentation. This seems to draw the fruitflies pretty well, but not fast enough to keep up with their production. So we'll put them both out and maybe do a fruitfly count to see if one is better than the other.

Or maybe not.

Goal for this week: Clean the area around the TV enough to make it worth unpacking the Wii. Remind me to tell you the Wii story sometime.

Wow, sleep

I got done with a biggish task at work around 1:30, so I took myself out to lunch, determined not to go home and just go to sleep or something. By 3pm, I was well fed, freezing cold, and tired. So I went home. I started to sort laundry and then decided that a Nap was in my future. So about 5pm, I was asleep.

Ah.

I woke up about 8pm. I thought about getting up, but decided that I just didn't want to spend the rest of the night awake. So I forced myself to stay in bed. I read. I watched a couple of episodes of NewsRadio on DVD. I grabbed a fiber bar from my bedside table and had that for dinner. And I drifted off again about 10pm.

Ah.

I didn't sleep through the night exactly, but I didn't spend a lot of time worrying about getting back to sleep. So basically, I slept right through until about 9:30 this morning.

Ah.

I love sleep. And obviously I needed it. Now I have to accomplish something. I have a stack of papers to read and prioritize, a house to clean, and a ton(ne) of laundry to do. And I'm just holding my breath as to whether I'm going to need a nap this afternoon again....

The season's first mosquito bite

I went out to get a little exercise (very little, but at least I did it) and pick up some groceries. And when I got to the store (a whole block away, see above) there was this persistent itch on the back of my left ankle. Itch itch itch. Itched so much it almost hurt. Every couple of steps in the store I had to stop and rub it with my other foot. (I don't go around touching my feet in grocery stores with my hands as a rule.) When I got back home, I checked. Yup. Little tiny blood spot, raised little welt around it. I'd been bit.

And it's supposed to snow tonight. Hard. Damn little buggers. Die! Die!

Note to self: Don't take yourself to bed in the afternoon with the excuse that you'll snuggle under a warm blanket (did I mention it's expected to snow tonight? Hard?) while you catch up on some reading, because you'll just end up taking another four-hour nap.

The vicious cycle continues.

Almost typed that 'viscous'. *sigh*

To sleep, perchance to ... um, sleep.

Tuesday has become my MHGS day, as I have mentioned. So yesterday I sat down and discovered that not only have I not been working on my goals, I had actually forgotten a major task from last month. So I spent most of my useful waking hours dealing with that.

Here's the thing. I got to bed very late on Monday. After midnight. So even though I slept in until 9am, I was still tired. I got up, had some coffee and breakfast, sat down to accomplish something, got distracted, and let's just say that by noon I was ready for a nap again.

I didn't succumb immediately, which was probably a mistake. But by 3:30, I was about ready to go face first into the keyboard, so I went for a brief lie down. Which lasted until about 7pm. Not good.

So I went to bed last night around 12:30 again, and had a pretty good night, such that by 8am I was actually awake, out of bed, and functioning. So now I'm having breakfast and catching up with the MHGS.

So all the goals remain in place. The good news is that next week is 'mid term break', and Monday is an actual holiday (the first ever 'Louis Riel Day', which is just an excuse for a civic statutory holiday in Manitoba in February--in other provinces, there's "Family Day" which is even flimsier an excuse, as far as I can tell). So I'm expecting to have Monday and Tuesday to catch up with a lot of paperwork. On Wednesday, I have my big meeting with the Dean where I explain our timetabling needs and he tells me to come up with a new plan that doesn't cost any money (so I should give some thought to that before the meeting). Then, depending on road conditions, I might make a quick run to Trader Joes, in Maple Grove. Although having gotten that far it seems a shame not to hit IKEA in Bloomington, but that sounds like a lot of money in the long run.

So I still need to commit to 10 minutes a day of domestic activity, practicing my ASL has fallen by the wayside, the vacuum cleaner is still in the trunk of the car.

On the other hand, I'm awake and functioning and it's only 9:15am.

I'm screwed, and not in a good way <rimshot>

I was sleepy. I was going to barrel through some work, and go to bed early. But I was also cold, so I decided to snuggle up under a comforter to do some reading. And I fell asleep. This was about 5:30. I guess I woke up around 7.

So now I'm wide awake, and unlikely to get to sleep tonight any normal sort of human going-to-bed-time. I have, in fact, barreled through some of the work I was going to do, but it's now about 9:30 and I was going to go to bed. But, well, there wouldn't be much point. I could go out and try to find some action, but, well, I live in Winnipeg. <rimshot> I'm also over 40 now, and my notion of action is changing. Or maybe my standards are getting lower. I don't know.

All I know is a) I did have something to say on Thursday, but I never got around to saying it and now I don't remember what it was, b) much as I turned out to have enjoyed my nap, I'd really have preferred not taking it and going to bed now and sleeping straight through until morning like an human, and c) if I'm going to accomplish anything 'outside' it better be tomorrow, cuz they say there's a blizzard blowing in on Monday and Tuesday. 15 cm of snow in the city. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but anything over about 4-5cm will completely screw up the city for most of a week. So we're screwed on all fronts. And not in a good way.

Another Thursday missed

Well, I didn't do an update on Thursday, mostly because I stayed home and did some tidying up. The upshot of which is in the afternoon, when I normally would have spent some time online catching up with stuff, I took a near life-changing three hour nap.

I love naps. I love naps more than sleeping at night. I tend to fall asleep faster, deeper, and wake up actually refreshed after a long daylight-hours nap than I do at night. Part of me wonders if I'm reverting to a pre-antidepressant, grad-school state of actually being afraid to go to sleep at night (for a number of neurotransmitter-related all-in-your-head kinds of reasons) but having no problem sleeping, say, between 7am and noon, and again between 3pm and 6pm. Which explains why all my best writing occured between 1 and 3am. Typical grad school kind of schedule, but not what you call mentally healthy.

I've always been a thrasher in my sleep, and my fancy new space-age mattress that is supposed to eliminate that hasn't. Which is not a problem, except that in the last few weeks instead of going to sleep on my back and waking up on my back, but in the meantime having traversed every possible angle and position--I used to go to sleep on my back, blankets nice straight and wake up that way, but with all my blankets turned upside-down. Anyway, lately I've been waking up with my upper body folded over onto my right, trapping my right arm under my body. Which would be fine--I guess my shoulders are unusually flexible in that direction--but it usually means my right elbow and wrist are flexed as well--so not only am I stressing the blood flow, I'm stressing my ulnar nerve, and setting off my intermittend ulnar palsy.

This is a new word for me, and I'm sort of enamo(u)red of it, in the way that when somebody gives you a new word for something that you thought only you ever experienced or thought about you feel validated. Ulnar Nerve Palsy is a condition where you get tingling/numbness, etc. in your ring and little fingers related to stressing the nerve, which runs along the outside of the elbow. Since I've been experiencing this in both arms, mostly from my habit of clutching my blankets up to my chin when I'm cold--which I almost always am in the morning--I've been trying to keep my elbows mostly extended in bed. Which works fine as long as I'm awake, and on my back, and warm, but whem rolled over on your side or belly it's hard to keep your arms straight. And apparently my body is trying to get me to sleep on my side. Or something.

One wonders if this is my (familial) history of snoring and/or apnea finally catching up with me. I'm really hoping it's just the 20 lbs I've put on in the last six months, and as I retake control of my diet and whatnot, I'll go back to normal. For some value of 'normal'.