Corner of Bourbon & Division

Why, oh why, do I always fool myself into thinking that I can get lots of stuff done during my night shift?

Today, I am apparently continuing in my quest of hopeless optimism, since I am yet again going to try to get stuff done.

Clearly, I am not playing with a full deck.

Tomorrow, however, I am going to spend all freaking day sleeping until it's time to go to sandman7's concert. No more running around.

I am watching Stargate: Continuum. So far, it's as I thought: it's like a two-hour episode that's pretending to be a movie. In fact, they already used this plot. The only difference is that there's a whole portion that happens in the Arctic, which I think was probably really cool for the cast. At least, they seem to think so in the commentary section.

Spent most of the day asleep after a really long night. We have a guy in from O Division (Ontario), who is unfamiliar with ALL our systems, so I spent a lot of time training him. He then spent the rest of the night talking at me about computers. He's a hardware specialist, spent 10 years or so working for HP, and explained a ton of stuff about the nuts and bolts of how computers work.

He's a lot older than I am, and apparently took great delight in playing Obi-Wan to my Luke Skywalker.

I would much rather have spent the night in quiet, doing my work and being left the hell alone, no matter how interesting it was. The first night of a night shift is brutal, and I don't think I have retained even 10% of what he told me.

So I'm going to be spending the whole week with him. I hope he settles down, because I don't think I can take six more nights of this.

Also: new icon!

I figured out a way to get stuff done while I'm on night shift: do it the minute I get home in the morning. I only had about half an hour's worth of productivity, but it's half an hour more than I've ever managed in the past.

Starting tomorrow, though, I'll be pulling twelve-hour shifts thanks to the Overtime Fairy, so I think my productivity on the home front will tank once more. At least I got *something* done today.

Next week is going to be a whirlwind of activity. I may as well start battening down the hatches now. ;)


I don't especially feel like going to work tonight. I'd rather stay home and go back to sleep. The cats have awoken me twice in a row now by stepping directly on my face. It's not as much fun as it sounds.

I would way rather be down in Vermont with bodhifox and company than be here at work. As we speak they are either still drinking beer and chatting, or they've gone to bed happy.

I, on the other hand, have another four hours and forty-five minutes left of this tedium.

Most of the people I count on for late-night posts are in Vermont right now, having a good time without me.

I really hate night shift.

I ended up accidentally turning off my alarm clock, or perhaps I forgot to set it. Either way, I slept all the way through to 16:45, exactly forty-five minutes before I had to leave for work.

Oops.

Every single time I'm on night shift I delude myself with the thought that I can be productive during the day. Every single time I prove myself wrong. Think I'll learn next time?

Perhaps I should review all my LJ posts from previous night shifts every time to remind myself that I am useless when working nights.

The apartment hasn't deteriorated, but it has stagnated. Perhaps next week I'll be able to make further headway.

Yeesh.

Before going home (and to bed) today, I must stop off at my parents' place to collect the mail and make sure their plants don't die of dehydration. I haven't been in over a week, so I hope they're still relatively okay.

I'm going to talk more about working night shift, because it's all I'm doing lately and it's eating what's left of my brain.

Another new and exciting facet of working night shift is that it sticks me in this weird limbo where I feel all energetic around 03:00 (so, right about now), and I start thinking up projects in my head. I have about five or six projects lurking at the back of my mind. So I think to myself: "Cool! I have all this energy and all these projects, I can probably get started on them later today!"

For instance, I want to do a major purge of all the extraneous stuff I have in the apartment before I move. That way, I will spare myself having to pack a whole bunch of stuff that I don't ever use.

I have laundry to do, and floors to wash (yes, even using the Scooba, I still have some prep work to do), and cooking and baking projects. Cooking and baking means I need to stop by a grocery store, etc.

I get all revved up about all this, which keeps me going until, oh, about 05:30 or even 06:00. Then I start getting a bit tired, since my shift is nearly over. By the time 06:30 rolls around, I'm ready to go home and pass out.

Then I think to myself: "But what about all my projects?"

Myself answers: "It's 06:30. You can't go to the grocery store because it's closed. If you do laundry now, you need to stay awake for the entire cycle, so you can then hang it outside to dry. Multiply that by three loads of laundry, and you'll have been up all morning. When exactly were you planning on sleeping?"

So I generally get to bed somewhere around 07:30 or 08:00 at the very latest. Sometimes if I have a really important errand I'll get up at 14:00 to run it, but I don't usually have the energy for more than that. So I go home and go back to bed. Today, since I had a couple of errands to run, I split my "night" in half, and ended up sleeping from 08:30 (I had trouble getting to sleep this morning) to 13:30, and then from 16:00 to 20:00. I left for work at 21:30. Can we see where this leaves me no time for the aforementioned shiny projects?

Now, the rational part of me knows that I have no energy for anything except sleeping and working when I'm on night shift, and especially not when I'm working night shift *and* overtime. Right now, I'm working fourteen days straight, for a total of 128 hours. This will all be over next Monday, when I'll be on holiday for a little less than a week. The rational part of me reassures me that it's not the end of the world that my laundry isn't done, that the floors aren't clean, that the cat pans need more attention than I'm currently giving them, and that I have six unattended projects in the works. The rational part of me is being very forgiving.

The irrational side of my brain is pitching several screaming, kicking fits every day. It yells that I'm going to be moving soon (never mind that it's going to be a *minimum* of six to eight weeks before that happens under the best of circumstances), that nothing's being done, that I'm wasting all my daylight hours by sleeping, and that I'm frittering away the entier summer ZOMG. Yeah. Did I mention irrational?

I'm just glad this is going to be over soon. I think anything more than two solid weeks of night shift might just drive me round the proverbial bend.

One hour and forty-five minutes to go, and I appear to have weathered the shift quite well. I had major energy shortage between 20:00 and 23:00, and almost fell asleep a few times, but apart from that I'm doing really well. I'm awake and pretty alert, and generally pleased with how I've handled this shift.

My current shift partner has been a doll this night. He's been really quiet and hasn't expected me to make conversation, although we did bond over a not-very-good murder mystery that was running on MPIX for a while.

I have also managed to get my two gaming write-ups done for Incarnate III during the times when I wasn't busy and I was sick of data entry, and that means that I can go home and sleep for most of the morning! YAY! Four hours of sleep isn't ideal, but it's better than nothing and ought to keep me going until I get home tonight.

In case, dear flist, you're wondering what Phnee has been smoking lately, in order to be posting so often, I have made a mini-resolution to "catch up" on all my internet-related things in February. So I'm aiming for one LJ post a day, and one post per Skywatch character per week (minimum). The next few weeks are going to be busy, work-wise, but I'm not working nights again until March, so I'm hoping that that will help me gain an even keel for a while.

More later!