Weather and Sleep
Apr. 24th, 2026 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
citrakayahFor reasons that I suspect had something to do with a temporary loss of sanity, I agreed to spend my weekend driving a rental car across the state back to work. And yeah, I do mean my entire weekend, because it was a seven hour drive one way so I had to stay overnight in a cheap motel.
Okay, temporary loss of sanity is overselling it a bit. I did it because they pay through the nose for overtime hours. Still, I regret my choice in retrospect, especially since on the way back, I encountered a snowstorm with near white-out conditions. Made driving a lot harder, I'll tell you that, and it was slick enough in patches to fishtail the car.
Combined with working overtime every single day (an average shift lasts over nine hours, though that includes commuting), I haven't had that much time for myself. Which makes it rather ironic that over the past couple weeks I've managed to do a decent amount of writing and painting despite my workload. Time crunches, it appears, are good for my focus.
I also changed my schedule, which I think helped a lot. Early this month I'd been working a lot of morning shifts, which had me waking up at 4:30 AM. The result was that I was tired all the time, and about a week in I'd started developing sleeping issues. Every two hours, I'd wake up. I could go back to sleep, but the result was that I wasn't getting proper REM sleep (far as I can tell, anyway, I'm not a sleep doctor) which mean that even if I had eight hours of sleep I felt exhausted and had neck pain and headaches the next day.
But since shifting to evening shifts, that's solved. It does harm my social life, since I like to socialize online and my free hours are when most people are working weekdays, but I've been managing. Tomorrow I'll be GMing some stuff on Kaerwyn in the mornings--I work in the afternoon and evening, but since it's the weekend other people won't be.
Okay, temporary loss of sanity is overselling it a bit. I did it because they pay through the nose for overtime hours. Still, I regret my choice in retrospect, especially since on the way back, I encountered a snowstorm with near white-out conditions. Made driving a lot harder, I'll tell you that, and it was slick enough in patches to fishtail the car.
Combined with working overtime every single day (an average shift lasts over nine hours, though that includes commuting), I haven't had that much time for myself. Which makes it rather ironic that over the past couple weeks I've managed to do a decent amount of writing and painting despite my workload. Time crunches, it appears, are good for my focus.
I also changed my schedule, which I think helped a lot. Early this month I'd been working a lot of morning shifts, which had me waking up at 4:30 AM. The result was that I was tired all the time, and about a week in I'd started developing sleeping issues. Every two hours, I'd wake up. I could go back to sleep, but the result was that I wasn't getting proper REM sleep (far as I can tell, anyway, I'm not a sleep doctor) which mean that even if I had eight hours of sleep I felt exhausted and had neck pain and headaches the next day.
But since shifting to evening shifts, that's solved. It does harm my social life, since I like to socialize online and my free hours are when most people are working weekdays, but I've been managing. Tomorrow I'll be GMing some stuff on Kaerwyn in the mornings--I work in the afternoon and evening, but since it's the weekend other people won't be.
