Made some changes

Saturday, 6:26 am

By Kate

Jul

09

2005

It’s raining out. Yahoo.

It’s Saturday again. The day before the lad comes home. I’ve not done the one thing that I usually do when he goes away on an extended vacation—clean his room. I looked at it this morning and considered pitching in today, but decided against it. He has to sort through all his own papers to decide what to keep and what to toss out. And let me be clear—his floor is composed of one pile of papers after another. Most of this vacation I’ve just shut the door and ignored it. I think that when he comes home, since his girlfriend will be in Scotland for the next several weeks, I’ll lay claim to his time for the next week. Every single day. Two objectives: clean his room and do outside work. The latter is somewhat contingent on how much sunshine and dry weather we get. Some outside work is okay for days with a thunderstorm or a rain shower. But painting needs a block of dry days. It’s going to take a couple of days to dry everything out again, but tomorrow is supposed to be lovely. Just in time for his arrival home in the late afternoon. That’s a start.

My main objective during this vacation has been to alter my schedule back to a...well...normal schedule. I’ve made no secret here that I am naturally a night person. It’s not just my preference, it’s the way my whole system works. And it doesn’t take long to revert to night personhood, either. Maybe three or four days at most. During summer vacations, it happens very quickly. Only this time, I’ve decided that it just doesn’t work for me anymore. I am much more productive during the day. If for no other reason—I can’t make noise at night (out of consideration for my neighbor) or see to work outside.

So I was faced with the challenge of turning my nights back into day. I’d say that my sleep schedule was about 12 hours off. So, over the course of two weeks, I’ve had one heck of a weird schedule. Sleeping when tired and rising when rested. Trying to postpone sleep for an hour every day. A couple of times I’ve literally woken up wondering if it was day or night. That’s disorienting.

Well, I finally did it. I went to sleep around midnight, last night, and I was wide awake at 6:30 this morning. Naturally. No alarm clocks. Just natural.

I’ve been out of sorts the last two weeks. And struggling with this schedule change. I’m just tired of being awake when everyone else is asleep. When something doesn’t work anymore, it’s a good time to change it.

So I have. And this morning I’ve had energy to burn. Already I’ve fed the dogs, put in a load of laundry, made the coffee, and swept and mopped the kitchen floor. Lots more to do today, but mostly inside work. The rain still falls and the place looks like a jungle outside. I can’t wait for this wretched rain to stop! But, when it does, I’ll be ready to take full advantage of it.