Sleepy Jean Is Sleepy. Also, P:OR Progress

This has been one of those weeks where everything just feels off, no doubt because I've had insomnia for about three nights in a row. Funny how sleep deprivation makes you feel off-kilter and like everything is hard, isn't it? Last night I finally got a decent night's sleep, after taking some Benadryl, so I'm feeling much better today, albeit still a bit draggy and like I need one more night of really great sleep to catch up and feel normal again.

This week is making me glad I decided not to totally eliminate coffee from Project: Oven Repair (Take Two).

Speaking of the diet reboot, it's going well. Avoiding bread hasn't been the struggle I thought it would be (although I did break down and have half a bagel and some crackers at various points yesterday, because I was too tired to cook vegetables), and I've been eating more of a variety and actually enjoying my food.

I decided to lay off of the scales for a while, and just gauge my progress by how well I feel and how my clothes are fitting. I was feeling pretty great until the insomnia kicked in (accompanied, of course, by really bad hay fever), and yesterday I reached a new progress benchmark: my size 12 jeans fit for the first time in at least four years. I still need to lose about a half-inch or so before they're really comfortable, but they're definitely wearable.

Unfortunately, the insomnia also raised a speed bump in my daily exercise routine, and for the past couple of days I've been too busy/distracted/tired to bother. I figure two days isn't really a habit-killer, and if I can make myself go for my 45-minute walk today, I'll be fine. Which I'm going to do right after I finish this post.

We're tentatively planning a visit to the nearest state park this weekend, to have a picnic and walk the nature trails. I was really hoping we'd have our new camera by then, but Matt's still trying to decide which fancy lens to invest in, so it doesn't look like we will. But at least this time I'll be sure to take our 5MP point-and-shoot, so we won't be relegated to our cell phone cameras if we see something cool, like we were last time.

All righty. Time to get off this couch and go move.

...And just as I was previewing this post and about to hit Publish, we heard sirens cut off right in front of our house, and shouting and "Put your hands up!" and we looked outside to see two cops with their guns pointed at this guy who was backing slowly toward them with his hands in the air. Now they've got him cuffed and they're out there patting him down and searching his car. I guess my walk's on hold until COPS: Live On Location In Our Front Yard is over and they take the criminal away.

I's Tired

I think I got about four hours of sleep this morning. I'd already been tossing and turning with my good ol' buddy insomnia for a couple of hours when a raucous thunderstorm moved in last night and started making a scary racket just as I was on the verge of finally drifting off to sweet, sweet slumber. At first I was overjoyed to hear the sounds of rain, because yay, end of drought! But then it grew loud enough to wake Matt and scary enough to make me get out of bed to turn on the TV and make sure a tornado wasn't bearing down on us. When I saw that it was "just" 60 mph winds, I turned it off and we went back to bed, where Matt went back to sleep and I went back to tossing and turning. At about 4 AM I got up and took half a Benadryl and read until it started to kick in, and I think I finally fell asleep around 5:00. And then my dog woke me up a mere two hours later, and it took me another long while to get back to sleep. So when I had to get up by 10:00 to get ready for "lunch" (aka, breakfast) with my mom and sis, you can bet your sweet bippy that I drank me some more coffee. Oh yes, I did.

Today is my Big Sis's birthday, so my mom took her out to lunch, as per tradition, and I was invited to tag along, also as per tradition. I thought it was just going to be lunch, and then I would be returned home where I could nap the afternoon away, but as it turned out they had shopping plans that took the better part of the afternoon. Which is actually fine, because I enjoyed myself despite running the risk of getting shot in the head by someone who mistook me for the forerunner of a zombie invasion.

It certainly didn't hurt that my mom took pity on my broke-arsed status and bought me these (except in this color) after she saw me admiring them, despite my protestations that I have nothing to wear them with and no place to wear them, for the simple reason that they were both cute and 80% off (plus another 30% with a coupon she kept brandishing at us) and therefore they shouldn't be passed up on principle. This might surprise some folks, but I've always had a bit of a shoe obsession, but I've forced myself to curtail it in the last few years. So it was definitely nice to get a pair of shoes for the sole reason that they're cute and they make me happy, and not because they serve a particular function or fill a necessary wardrobe niche (i.e., neutral dress flats). In short: CUTE SHOES! YAY!

Insomnia's not the only reason I'm tired. I'm also starting to be just plain worn out. We've had appointments every day this week, and it will continue until the weekend. On Monday, we had to trek out to the university campus 45 minutes away to pick up Matt's textbooks. On Tuesday, we had to go meet with DHS to see if we qualify for assistance with Matt's impending gallbladder surgery (good news: we do). Today was lunch and shopping, and tomorrow and Friday will be grocery shopping and other errands, which we've taken to splitting over two days because getting them all done on Thursdays has been exhausting. That might not sound like that much, but when you're used to hardly ever leaving the house except to go buy groceries a couple times a week, this much having to get dressed and get in the car in one week is a shock to the system. And my system is definitely looking forward to a day to stay home and get over this feeling of "Fire bad, tree pretty."

Altering My Natural Sleep Cycle (Without Losing Sleep Over It)

In my fantasy, I'm a morning person. I want to be the sort of person who gets up early and has super-productive mornings, freeing up the afternoons to work on whatever personal or home-related project I feel like working on and the evenings to just relax and chill with Matt, my day broken up into nice, orderly sections.

In reality, I sleep in late because I stay up late. It usually takes at least two cups of coffee and an hour poking around the internet before my brain can handle anything more strenuous than skimming Twitter and clicking links, and my work gets spread all throughout the day and evening, with occasional breaks to take care of other things that need my attention, or just recharge my batteries before diving back in, until I'm too worn out to keep going. There's nothing orderly about it.

This week, I've been making myself get up at nine AM. That sounds luxuriously late if you usually have to be at the office by eight, I know. But if you make your own schedule and have no particular reason to wake up by any certain time, trust me, it's early. Nine seems like a good compromise between my night-owlishness and my desire to give myself enough time to get things done earlier in the day and leave myself some chillaxin' time at the end of it.

Timely and relevant to this, yesterday Lifehacker ran an article on How to Reboot Your Sleep Cycle and Get the Rest You Deserve. It was full of good advice, albeit nothing really new to a sometimes-chronic insomniac who's already read all the advice there is about getting yourself to sleep.

Part of the advice was to experiment with earlier and earlier bed times until you start waking up before your alarm. Well, that's the problem, isn't it? I've always had problems with set bed times. As much as I love and need sleep, I hate going to bed early as much now as I did when I was a little kid. It's partly because going to bed before I'm truly sleepy tends to trigger my insomnia.

But a while back I read somewhere -- I'm pretty sure it was on Rules for Anchorites, but I can't find the post -- a discussion similar to this where someone suggested that night owls simply have a hard time relinquishing the day, and... yes. This. It's so hard to let go, to admit that I'm done with a day, that I've done all I can with it. It feels like defeat.

Even so, last night I thought I'd try Lifehacker's advice and make myself go to bed earlier. I've been averaging about seven hours of sleep all week, so I felt tired enough that I knew I could use the extra hour. But then I started reading a new book, and by the time I forced myself to put it down and go to bed it was already after one AM and I was facing another less-than-eight-hour night.

Then, this morning, I woke up before my alarm anyway. I lay there for a minute, not sure if I was truly awake and trying to will myself to get up, thinking how victorious it would feel to get up before my alarm went off. But I was still just on the cusp of wakefulness, and in the midst of my self-pep-talk I closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew my phone was vibrating (I use my phone's alarm on the silent setting, tucked into my pillow, so as not to wake Matt) and I was waking back up from a dream about a particularly odd episode of Castle involving an escaped killer baboon and a tornado (it was too much tornado and not enough Nathan Fillion for my liking; there was, however, just enough baboon to keep it weird).

So much for that.

But I refuse to give up just yet. Maybe if I keep forcing myself awake at nine, eventually the not-quite-enough sleep I've been getting will catch up with me, and my body will want to go to bed earlier. That's the theory, anyway. Of course, I can't recall any other time in my 37 years that it's ever worked out that way, but that's probably because after a week I'd usually give up and stop setting the alarm; or, when that wasn't an option, I'd always use the weekends to catch up on sleep and then have to start all over again on Mondays. This time, I'm going to do my best to stick with it. After all, I figure it's getting to be now or never, and I'm not ready to let go of that productive-morning-person fantasy just yet.

Insomnia-induced NaNoWriMo ramblings

I'm coming at dawn from the wrong side this morning. My circadian rhythms are so far out of whack that I never even felt like going to bed all night. I'm feeling a little like it now, but if I went to bed now I'd sleep the whole day away and be right back where I started tomorrow morning.

I whiled away the wee, small hours by finishing up a copy writing project I've been doing for a while, and since finishing I've been blowing off steam by playing around with graphics for my NaNo profile. It's been a productive week of novel planning, and I've got all of my main POV characters profiled, a stack of notecards full of scene ideas to arrange, and, wonder of wonders, I even have a title:



With all of that, I was feeling inspired enough to mock-up a fake book cover. I found an image on a royalty free graphics site that was almost too perfect, added my text, and voila! A "cover" that I almost wish I could actually use if this book ever sells to a publisher. Of course, knowing me, there's bound to be more romance than is indicated here, but I'm pretty sure that the whole zombies vs. vampires thing is my hook.

Speaking of which, here's the "synopsis" that's currently in my profile, which is not so much a plot synopsis, since I don't know enough to write one of those yet, as it is my "Big Idea" thought process:

Dominion of the Damned explores the question of how an underground race of vampires would react to a global zombie infestation killing off their food supply. Assuming that, since they're a different kind of living dead, vampires A) would be immune to the zombie-making virus and B) would be ignored by zombies who crave living flesh, it would fall to the vampires to defend humanity against the zombie hordes. But then, how would humanity, now an endangered species, react to the "saviors" who still see them as food?

And lastly, my "excerpt", which is more of a character study/scene fragment, and which may or may not make it into the manuscript, and which definitely does not count toward my 50,000 words, because that would be cheating:

Hannah stood back from the exam table to study Noah. Sitting there without his clothes, he looked so tiny and frail. Under the sickly green glare of the fluorescent lighting, he looked paler than ever, his ribs and sunken chest a testament to his malnourishment. Glancing up, she almost jumped at the ghastly image looking back at her before realizing it was her own reflection in the polished steel of a medical cabinet. She didn't look much better than her brother. The chestnut hair that had once been her crowning glory had thinned and lost its luster. She was just as pale as Noah, and the visible cheekbones she had once prayed to get while making fish-faces in the bathroom mirror only made her look skeletal and tired. Add in sunken eyes with dark circles underneath, and she could almost be mistaken for just another member of the walking dead. Not a good look if one wanted to keep her head attached. She tore her eyes away from the image before the reality of it could make her cry, and gave another start to see Alex standing beside her.

His eyebrows raised questioningly at her gasp, and she looked back at the cabinet's reflective surface. She hadn't imagined it: only she and Noah showed up there. As she moved closer to the exam table and pulled Noah protectively against her, Alex followed her gaze. “Oh, yes. That. I haven't figured that one out yet.”

“Figured what out?” asked Noah, oblivious to the strangeness, the otherness of Alex.

Alex pointed at his non-reflection. “The mirrors. It's one aspect of vampirism that my science has failed to explain to me.” His gaze caught Hannah's and he smiled, briefly, before pulling a scope from the pocket of his white lab coat and bending level with Noah's head. “All right, let's have a look at you, small one.”

And that is what's been keeping me occupied and awake in the pre-dawn hours of the morning. Right now, Husband is also up, because his brand of insomnia wakes him up super early, and he put on Treasure of the Sierra Madre while he's having breakfast. I'm debating on whether to make some coffee and have some breakfast along with him, or cave in to the sleepy and go to bed. But I think I can hold out at least a couple more hours, and then take a short nap that'll get me through the rest of the day, and then maybe I'll stand a chance of falling asleep at a more reasonable hour tonight. So I guess coffee and breakfast it is, then. And then maybe I'll get to work arranging that stack of notecards into something that vaguely resembles a plot.