simple beatitude

It’s been almost a week since I came to stay with my sister and her family, to meet my new niece and help with child-minding duties while my sister and brother-in-law do other (non-child-related) things. Not everyone’s idea of a restful holiday, but if you’ve worked where I do, you might understand (not to say I don’t like work; it’s just frickin’ tiring sometimes).

As a guest, I’ve been following the routines of the household. Well, most of them. My nephew (who is two years old) has breakfast at 7am, but I don’t sleep anywhere near as early as he does, so I get up a bit later. Still, everyone has lunch at 11am, and then dinner is served at 5pm.

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next chapter

Today I finished reading Birds Art Life Death (by Kyo Maclear) and I really want to publish a post about it, but I don’t think today is the day for that. I feel a bit out of sorts. Probably I’m just sleep deprived – more than usual, that is. 

no metaphorical rain today

Today has been unexpectedly very productive. This is probably an insignificant post in the grand scheme of things, but I don’t think I’ve had such a productive non-work day in so long, so in my books it’s worth recording. Didn’t plan on writing this post, though, so it’s kind of more stream-of-consciousness than usual.

Anyway, I didn’t get to bed until about 1am last night, so I didn’t bother setting an alarm, deciding that I should allow myself a sleep-in (it’s Sunday, after all). I woke up at some point in the morning to the sound of really heavy rain outside …and then I went back to sleep.

TGI-almost-F

This feels like it’s been the longest week ever. Coming off a couple of short weeks, due to public holidays, and then having a normal Monday to Friday plus a full Saturday shift is not fun. My mind has been a day ahead all week.

The draggy-ness of this week is probably not helped by my less-than-ideal sleeping pattern this week.

I’d decided some time around New Year’s that I wanted to fix my sleeping habits/routine this year. Six hours a night is not sustainable. I’m sure I wrote about this in a post at some point last year…

enough sleep

I reckon this year I’ve been struggling with getting “enough sleep” more than any other year since leaving uni. “Enough sleep”, I think, is rather arbitrary and subjective. Most nights I quite possibly only get 6 or 6.5 hours of sleep. I generally feel fine during the day; it’s just the initial waking up and getting out of bed that’s hard – really hard – but only on week-days… On week-days, waking up after 6.5 hours of sleep, it is the easiest thing to fall right back to sleep. On the week-end, however, without an alarm, I’ll wake up after about 6 hours of sleep, and I’ll be almost wide awake. It is quite annoying how that happens.

Believe it or not, I didn’t actually intend for this post to be about sleep. Well, to be fair, I don’t really know what I’d intended for this post to be about. Kind of just felt like I needed to write something – anything.

And here I am, not sleeping. It’s approaching 11pm; I probably should’ve gone to bed at least half an hour ago. I think this night owl business started somewhere in uni, and I just never readjusted. Maybe it started before then, but at least in high school I never really had to get up that early (thank-you 9:15am starts). These days, leaving the house by about 7am is normal. Back in high school, I’d probably only just be getting out of bed, or just brushing my teeth at 7am.