webcowgirl

I am tired this afternoon. It might have been from all of the iced tea I had yesterday afternoon after our big steak dinner, though I'd expect the cider would have slowed me down enough for later.



It might be because I haven't been to the gym in two weeks - my membership has expired and I don't really feel like spending £99 for two months of gymming. Last week I was happy not to have it as the AC at LA Fitness is NOT very good and I expected I would have fallen over dead from heat exhaustion if I'd gone in.

But today it's nice and cool and after going to the doctor and discovering I'm at an all-time weight high and my blood pressure is up, it seems like it would be a very good thing to be getting some exercise today (and tomorrow, and the next day). But I just missed on getting a deal for £75 for THREE months and I don't want to sign up for the outrageous terms just described.

It seems, in fact, that all of the energy I have in my body can be described as "just about enough to look at adorable pictures of baby hedgehogs" (and then make a new user icon out of them).

Schedule: tomorrow Time and the Conways (for only £10, no, really, join us if you'd like), then Last Seen at the Almeida Theatre's Summer Festival (join us for that too if you'd like, we're going to the 7 PM one), then off to Scarborough for a lovely weekend courtesy of the_same_sky. I think it will be a nice week overall.

There's an interesting article in the New York Timese about how people's sleep patterns vary, both over age groups and just across different people based on genetics. Reading this:

"Bright light has a powerful effect in shifting the phase of our body clock, and if we don’t see much bright light — and many office workers do not — then our circadian health suffers."

made me wonder if a lot of the decrease in my insomnia (anyone notice a reduction in my complaints about a lack of sleep?) has actually been related to getting a window office at work, which happened, what, in the summer last year? I fought hard to get the one window seat in my team, and if I'm not mistaken, that benefit is still paying off.

Otherwise, my health is improved again today, though I'm trying to figure out what to do with a free night ... maybe I can get a ticket to see Man of Aran - might be a nice mental companion to Riders to the Sea. Pop-up tea room for lunch today, that's for sure!

Okay, I think this is GREAT NEWS and have to share it.

"There is no cure for the common cold, but in an experiment that deliberately infected volunteers with a virus, researchers have shown that getting less sleep can substantially increase the risk of catching one."

I have often felt that the amount of sleep I get is directly related to my ability to ward off infection, and since I started, er, drinking red wine to stave off the effects of aging (per another article) and generally getting 8 hours a night (I think these things are related), I have managed to fight off cold after cold. I firmly believe that eating well and getting enough sleep and regular hand washing (and not getting colds) is the best way to avoid getting colds ... and I am right in one of these things! I have felt one after another hit this winter but I've just had a runny nose that was gone the next day - a huge improvement over last year. I've also been trying to adjust my schedule so that I'm not getting home after 10:30 so I have enough time to wind down before bed, and I feel like this has been paying off.

(The "don't get a cold to keep you from getting a cold" sounds redundant but I need something to explain the fact that when you get one you tend to get a million in a row due to your immune system being overtaxed or something like that.)

Also, some further advice about avoiding heart attacks: get tested for C-reactive protein, Mediterranean diet (the Sicilian cooking will serve me well), take care of your teeth, avoid chronic stress (like I had all of the last five months of this year), get enough sleep, and a bit of cardio. Time to add in a bit more cardio - brisk walking will work and I note it's sunny outside. :-)

Wow, my uncle leaves tomorrow morning. I'll be sorry to see him go but I'm completely exhausted and looking forward to sleeping in and doing sweet f-a tomorrow.

I didn't even read my LJ flist today. Now THAT is busy.

Tomorrow I'll write about the Darwin exhibit and also work on reviewing the three shows I've seen the last three days. But right now, really, what I think I'm going to do is go sleep.

I dreamed I was working at a coffee shop slash art gallery slash theater that I'd taken over so that it wouldn't close. That meant that I got to make all of the customers' orders, bus tables, and wash dishes while other people were performing on stage. I also got to spend my paycheck from my real job buying supplies as there wasn't actually enough money coming in to, oh, buy coffee and dish soap.

I also dreamed I saw someone on the streets outside the coffee shop skateboarding on the walls - dressed like Guy Fawkes - having a shootout with some invisible people driving a van.

When I woke up, I noticed that I was on the edge of the bed, shadowdaddy was in the middle and had both pulled the blankets off (making me cold) and colonized fully half of the bed, and the cat had taken over an entire half of the bed to herself - roughly three times the space I was occupying. No wonder I wasn't sleeping well - and let's not get into the dream about the time travelling ninjas.

I think the Chinese tea I had with dinner last night got to me, based on my heart rate at about 12:30 AM. It was the only reason why I wasn't sleeping that came to mind - I seemed tired enough.

I slept in later but I'm still exhausted. I should have been in bed earlier anyway, but, wow, I'm so woozy. I am also sore from the Pilates yesterday, but I'm okay with that. I just wish I wasn't so tired.

Wow, WORLD CLASS craptacular night's sleep last night. I was in bed with my eyes shut at 11:10 and awake when shadowdaddy came to bed half an hour later. Then it was a fair bit of free association (trip to Madrid, my friend Helen Hestenes from the Phoenix days, how I can get work to send me to that conference, what I'm supposed to be doing there today) and at 12:45 I decided to have a look at the clock just to see how I was doing. I finally broke down at that point and took some melatonin (I'd already been up, what, four times) even though I knew it was going to make getting up that much harder. But hey, I was up at 5:45 and 6:30 anyway, or at least I looked at the clock then, and finally gave up and got out of bed a few minutes ago. It's not like I was sleeping. (My normal get out of bed time is 7:20, for those who care).

I really, really try for 8 hours of sleep a night lest I sit in bed - I mean, sit in my chair - doing little other than keeping it warm. I have to be able to do some good thinking to get my work done and even a little sleep dep seriously impairs my performance. I'm screwed for today.

It makes me bitter to see how pitch black it is outside right now and how little traffic there is on the streets. I feel like I'm up at the crack of fucking dawn right now only it's not even dawn yet and most of London looks like they're taking today off, too, damn their sleeping eyes.

I don't know how much of this is due to how lackadaisical my sleep patterns have been over the last ten days or if maybe the five little cups of "competition grade Ti Kuan Yin" tea I had during the four o'clock hour yesterday really got to me or what. And I've heard melatonin cannot be bought here and I'm down to three tabs. That's going to make me seriously miserable.

That said, yesterday was a pretty fun day. butterbee appears to be coming down with a cold and was moving pretty slowly for most of the day, so we never really left the house. Instead, wechsler came over in the afternoon and spent the day hanging out with us. We played Puerto Rico (we all were not on top of our game) in the afternoon, had dinner, then got in a round of Guillotine afterwards. At some point, shadowdaddy and I moved the new chest of drawers into the bedroom, and I spent a bit of time reshuffling my clothes out of the old one and into the new. The transfer isn't finished yet, but it does look pretty handsome and I do have a lot more room that before.

God, I must have breakfast now. AAARGH. All of those days of 10 hours of sleep undone at one blow!

Yesterday afternoon I left work a little early to go to a talk on "Why Agile Teams Fail." I went with four of my coworkers who are on the Agile project we're having shoved down our throats at work and met wechsler there. The talk was good: as I thought, what we're doing at work has little to do with Agile per se and a whole lot to do with "using catch-phrases that let us ignore the spirit of the whole thing." So we're being graded on whether or not we have white boards to put our issues on and whether or not QA is running meetings to measure "quality" but ignoring the important stuff like "let developers drive what is happening" and "be flexible." On the other hand, I got the great idea of having lava lamps sitting in my team's area to show whether or not we have a working build in QA: a blue lava lamp for yes, a red lava lamp for no. And my efforts to keep team morale high may be far more important than I've ever suspected.

Unfortunately the talk did go for two entire hours, and as I hadn't had anything to eat (no money in my wallet, very bad), I was near dead from hunger long before the talk wrapped up and had little option but to go get some food immediately afterwards. This meant another trip to the Japanese restaurant shadowdaddy and I went to Friday night, and this time wechsler got the five-kinds-of-sushi-don and I got entirely new things, such as mini-chicken teriyaki, pork belly skewers, duck skewers, and quail egg skewers. It was so lovely and homey; all I wanted to do is order more plum wine and sit there and chat all night long.

Well, the bad part is that I didn't get back to the flat until WAY too late, and it took me a while to chill out, and even though I tried to get into bed in short order, I was too cold, it was too noisy, EVERYTHING worked against me and I think I've had about six hours of sleep (I know I slept because I was dreaming about Dawn dolls and Chicago and horseback riding). It's not a good way to start the day at the office that's devoted to report writing, and not a good way to set myself up for a night at the ballet, but ... what am I supposed to do. At least I feel empowered to send an email out about the talk last night that's going to be a big stick right up the ass of Mr. Pink Cuffs.

I had a good afternoon today. I left work early (well, after I'd been there for 9 hours) and headed off to a doctor's appointment. This time I got a good doctor; she diagnosed what I came to see her about AND gave me a referral for physical therapy for my knee. Hurray! She also helped me understand how she came to her diagnosis and gave me some information on figuring out how to use my employer health insurance. Oddly my blood pressure also was lower than it was when I was there earlier - go figure.

Then it was time for a bit of tottering around the high street as my ridiculous waking hour started to take its toll. I managed to find a copy of Kavalier and Clay (sp?) for £1 at one of the charity shops and my (free in the UK!) prescription at Boots, but at some point in the Sainsbury's I got a little brain dead and started feeling quite upset that I couldn't figure out where they were hiding the English muffins or the cookies that I wanted (Weston's Wagon Wheels, were you to be found with the "tea" items, the various cakes served with tea, the chocolate, or the snack foods?). This kind of near-breakdown is typical of me in an exhausted state, and I was fortunately saved by a phone call from shadowdaddy, who managed to talk me out of the store and back to the house, where I took a nap.

So a good afternoon all in all, and a pleasant slack evening with company for my Moroccan chicken with stewed squash and prunes (still working on that one) and doing little else. Hopefully I'll get enough sleep and tomorrow will go well - I'm excited because I'm taking my team out for a pizza party for lunch.

Insomnia. It's not a romantic disease. Can't it just stick to nights when I don't have anything to do in the morning?

Got through the first four chapters of Harry Potter last night.