Tuesday, December 30, 2014

"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.

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Don't envy you the rolling shifts...

Roberta X said...

I find them difficult. Usually I can go to bed very early Saturday, which makes the next two days work much better, but that wasn't an option this week.

Another chance to get it right comes up the week after next.