Insomnia is for the birds!

I worked too many long days this week. Yesterday I was swamped off and on all day dealing with an issue related to how we select people for different roles in our environment -- which controls what kinds of resources they can access. And then at the end of the day we had a Director's Meeting where I was presenting some of the Project Management changes we are starting to move towards to give the Director's a chance to provide some feedback. As a result, all day my attention level was exceedingly high.

When I finally got home for work, I ended up doing more work because I hadn't had a chance to get to some of the tasks I had wanted to get to during the day. By the time I went to bed, I was pretty tired, but wound up. I managed to fall asleep without too much difficulty, but then woke up at, like, 4:00 a.m.! Of course I just could not fall back to sleep. Instead, my head was full of horrible work things, like Home Org vs Ck Distribution Org vs Timesheet Org! How horrible is that? I finally gave up trying to sleep and just snuggled in my covers and complained at the cats for not being willing to cuddle with me. They are such traitors!

Today I worked at home in the a.m. -- very productive. Cats were once again traitors and stayed in the living room all morning! Lazy beasts. Now I'm in an Office 2007 Pilot Training Class. I quite like the new version, despite my desire not to.

Tonight I shall attempt to clean the house a bit in prep for the Quasar of Rage's birthday festivities. I do not want to face the wrath of QOR.

Drug Induced Sleep is Still Sleep

Well, I did finally sleep, though I fear it was only due to over-the-counter drugs. But, even drug induced sleep is sleep.

Update on World Without End: a collapsed bridge throws the cathedral-town into chaos, political machinations of a monk bear fruit, and a young woman loses her virginity. Oh, the horror.

I got my little old Mac Mini up and running again and am ripping some of my DVDs for playing on my iPods. I keep them backed up on my external drive, and can then play them on my TV without having to find the DVD in the closet. Very handy. Right now I'm watching Pride & Prejudice, the one with Keira Knightley. In all honestly, this version has grown on me and I can watch it over and over again without getting bored.

Tonight my brother and I are going to create some new characters on our WoW realm. This time, we are going to create Alliance characters and play them together. I haven't played my lvl 60 warlock, Sarilo, in a long time, and I kinda miss him. Blood Elves are just so very cute. I did create a new Alliance character on another realm so I could play with my friend's nephews. It took a while to get used to playing again because after not playing for a while I seemed to have lost all my skills. They came back quickly!

Slowly but surely my energy level is getting back to normal. Today I managed to stay at work to nearly 6:00 without feeling like I was ready to collapse.

And the exciting news: the Germans arrive this weekend! Can't wait!!!

Sleep Did Not Come

So, despite being exhausted from being sick and from many nights of poor sleep, I still need to manage sleep well. I have that horrible kind of insomnia that both makes it difficult to fall asleep AND makes it hard to fall back asleep if you get woken during the night. I'm sure it is stress, and I blame my job. My brain just chatters, chatters, chatters and I can't get it to shut up.

For example, at 4:00 a.m. I was lying in bed composing an email I wanted to send to my whole project team (50+ people) with an update on where we are with the different ares of our implementation. I mean, come on! Is that something I should be thinking about at 4:00 in the morning?

Then I tried counting backwards from 100. I did that 3 or 4 times. Then I thought, that's too east. I can get distracted from counting and go back to the inane chattering. So I then tried counting backwards from 500, but in threes. 500, 497, 494, 491, 488... that lasted for a while as it did require me to pay attention, but when I got down to the 200s and I still wasn't any closer to sleep, I gave up.

As you can see, it was not a restful night. I tossed and turned from 3:00 am to about 4:30 am, then got up to watch some TV and try to fall asleep on the couch, then went back into bed around 6:00 am, at which point I did finally fall asleep, only have to get up at 7:20 so I could get ready for work.

Is there no justice in the world? Can't someone just give me some sleeping pills please? Or maybe a bellhop who can carry around my stress luggage?