So I after my largely sleepless night I went to work. Walking down the hill to the bus wasn’t bad, in fact it felt good to be out in the incredibly warm (for January) air. I could feel the tiredness buzzing in my head but I thought tea or coffee (or both) would help that. I vowed to take a pill if I had any problem sleeping that night.

I got through most of the day more or less without incident and if I’d stopped at the soup for lunch I would have probably been OK. But I didn’t. I ordered an egg salad sandwich as well, with lots of vegetables. I ate the soup and then half the sandwich and within minutes the abdominal pain started. Exhaustion proves to be some sort of vulnerability amplifier. The pain was mild, so I went back to work and threw away the other half of the sandwich. The pain grew a little as I worked, but I thought it might settle with nothing else added to my system.

Between the tiredness and the pain, I did not stay late. The minute my time was up I shuffled out to the train. The walk home was nothing like the walk down the hill in the morning. The weather was still lovely, a few spitting rain drops, the smell of damp earth — the world was fine, but every step increased the pain.

When I got home I went straight to bed and struggled with sleep, exhaustion, pain and nausea. By evening, with the aid of a sleeping pill and antinauseant, sleep managed to win the battle.

It’s 09:30 the next morning, and the pain is largely gone. Still, no food yet; I think I’ll try soup later, if the pain stays away. Definitely no sandwiches, nothing solid, nothing with fiber.

Exhaustion is such a powerful thing and sleep it’s only antidote, so if it doesn’t come, all is screwed.

So yesterday’s cartoons were partly correct. I did feel like a frazzled cat by the end of business, but the works below by Zhiwan Cheung are a bit more accurate. The first: how I felt by yesterday evening before sleep finally bore me down.

At the moment I feel more like this:

It’ll be interesting to see what happens by the end of the day. The thing about moving through extremes of delight and exhaustion is that life is certainly interesting.

I haven’t been able to get back to sleep. I now have a new imagined state at the end of this day. Rather glad it’s Friday.

Remember my “Yahoo! The project is online”? Remember that I thought my long hours might be over for a while, even if others still have to put them in? Bleh.

I was not in a good mood today and I didn’t get out of the office until around 7pm. And now it is 3 am and I can’t sleep. And I have to leave the house at 7am. I suspect the following picture will describe my upcoming day.

The project is online.  I put in a few days as a bug-finder and then left that to the rest of the users.  The bug fixing is for the bug-fixers. At that point, I asked for, and was granted, several days off (5 in a row). I went home, went to bed and woke up sick. Normal for me after a period of over-work. I spent the first three days taking a few tottering steps outside and the rest in bed. Last night was the blow-out headache.

This morning I feel much better. So expect to hear more from me shortly.

The day I got back to work from the holidays, there was an avalanche of work. That’s bad enough, but on top of that there is a major project hitting deadline in a few days. So I worked some yesterday, and after coffee (I’m at the coffee house), I will be going in to work for abut 5 hours or so.

And I am working nowhere near as hard as the some of the other staff – the techies in particular.

Not that this makes me less grumpy or less tired. I am trying to reduce the emotional symptoms by sitting quietly watching things go by (like I did yesterday) and by watching light fare at the cinema (yesterday evening).  I suppose it’s helping because I am going to work today, because I haven’t snapped anyone’s head off, and I haven’t retreated into illness.

The thing is that, as part of the new system, I now have a work Blackberry. So before the lights went down at the cinema, I checked my work mail, responded to a couple.  After the movie, on the bus home, I checked again, and responded. Bloody thing. There was a reason I didn’t have a cell phone.

I don’t want to read; now you know how frazzled I feel. I have a book with me but all I want to do is drink my caffeine down and stare at the wall. I have a low grade headache, so that’s part of it.

Oh well. It’s short term. Come the 18th, we will have got all the t’s crossed – or we won’t.

Whinge done.

I am at the beginning of three days off. I woke with a headache which is not auspicious, but who cares. I have three days in which I can keep my mind harnessed to my own concerns.
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Lucky, lucky me. Work was quiet and relatively calm. Yahoo, it’s Friday and I’m now gone.

Sleeplessness makes me panicky. The night before last I woke at 3 AM and was unable to return to sleep and then last night I was so tired I was unable even to read let alone write. I went to bed around 6 PM unable to stay upright any longer. I did fall to sleep but woke again around 10 PM. I browsed around the internet for an hour or so, still unable to concentrate and finding myself easily upset. I mean I was getting upset over Obama’s heckler. Which led to getting upset about the fact that we seem never to learn from history, which led to me getting upset over human irrationality, and when I get to that point, the only thing to do is quit the day. So I went back to bed. And lay there.

I have a job of course. During times when I have a less rigorous schedule, sleeplessness at night is not such an issue. I simply take a nap. Or two. But now I have to get up, go to work, and actually be able to think. My desktop reads (and I have a dual screen system) “Do your work. Don’t be stupid.” I do try to live up to that each day. It’s ever so much harder to do that with a platform of sleep deprivation.

Anyway, enough whinging. I did find myself feeling that feathery black wing of panic last night as I lay there contemplating another day of problems without another night of sleep, but I did finally fall back into mindlessness. I woke only an hour early and so feel as if I can manage with eye drops and black tea. Hopefully there won’t be too many nasty little surprises today.

The problem with holidays is that they end.