"Well, Here I Am..."

     ...Which is one of the last lines from the Firefly episode, "Objects In Space."  Set during a sleep shift, it has a certain dreamlike or nightmarish quality, which is about how I feel at the two-thirds point of the three days that go from "early" to "earlier" and back to my normal shift, when I pull one of the earlybird fill-ins.  Usually they're just one week in three, but between holidays and vacations, I have been the predawn engineer every other Sunday-Monday for several weeks now and more to follow.

     I'm not complaining -- it's mostly indoors and there's no heavy lifting! -- but between lost sleep and being awake when one usually sleeps and vice-versa, I inevitably get a funny Monday evening stretch of wakefulness, having come home and stayed awake as long as I could manage, then slept deeply and fast and bobbed back to the surface a long way from Tuesday morning.  I'm not usually awake enough to take on anything very challenging, so I just read, watch TV or hang out online for awhile, drifting until the sandman calls once more.

     Indeed.