The joys of having an unconventional sleeping schedule – I work between two and six in the morning, so usually I sleep from about six or seven in the morning until about noon, then usually get a nap of two to four hours around midnight before going to work.
Unfortunately that means that I sleep most – or should, anyway – during those hours when repairs are done, when they need doing in the apartments of the apartment building I live in. Like several days last week. No point complaining, of course, since the drilling and hammering and more unidentifiable noises happened exactly when they are supposed to happen. Well, right now I only have that night job so not that big a problem, plenty of hours still left when I can sleep. You might think. Problem being that my kind of sleeping schedule is hard to keep even without distractions, so one f*cked up day can mean a week or two before I can get back to it. Humans are meant to sleep when it’s dark, not after the sun has risen. Right now I get sleepy a bit after noon, and if I succumb and go to bed and don’t use the alarm I will wake up around eight or nine in the evening. Unfortunately, from past experiences, the best way to get back to my normal schedule probably is to just keep pushing going to bed a two or three hours forward every day until I’m where I am again sleeping something like that four hours before work, and will then be sleepy enough to get to sleep right after work again.
Interesting part is of course how safe I am for driving even with my normal schedule. I have a couple of morning newspaper routes, and I do the routes with a company car (driver sits on the right side since that makes it easier to drop the newspapers, or, for the postal carriers who use the same cars the daily post, right from the opened window into the mailboxes – the idea is that on the countryside we are supposed to be able to do the whole route without having to get out of the car once, which of course never works quite that way in practice, especially during the winters :)). I do have to use my own to get where the company car is since the distance from my home is 12 kilometers, and buses don’t go at the time when I start the work. So, lots of driving between sleeping. Very good there is hardly any traffic at that time of the night. I haven’t had an actual accident yet, but I have to admit I have smashed the driver’s side mirror on the work car a couple of times (on the wrong side, remember, and I need to get close to those boxes in order to be able to get the newspaper in without getting out of the car, and some of those boxes are high enough that the damn mirror will hit them if I get just a liitle bit too close). I am not perhaps completely alert when I’m working.
Oh, the mirror hasn’t been completely totaled yet. Even if the person who drives the car during the day seems to keep doing the same thing to it. It’s just gotten loose enough that now even a small hit means the parts fall apart. Or driving over a big bump in the road. There are several rubber bands around the thing which sort of hold it together, but if we forget to replace the ones that break, yep, then things start to fall off.
Anyway, this week was mostly eaten by the disturbed sleep schedule, I didn’t get much done, but I’m getting things together again (awake enough in the mornings to paint right now) so should get new material up tomorrow or day or two after, latest.