I Live (Kinda)

(This is a bit journal-ish. Skip ahead if that kind of stuff doesn’t interest you.)

You know, the last time I can back from Australia, I was hungover and carrying the Aussie death flu bug, and I was wiped out for several weeks.

This time I seem to have been wiped out first, and then picked up an illness. I am beginning to suspect that all my scoffing at jet lag was a mistake–apparently there is a real thing there, but I just don’t notice it on trips of less than 12 time zones. (For me Australia is 15 time zones both ways, since I can’t do an around-the-world route as fast as I can do a there-and-back due to the vagaries of layover scheduling.)

Anyway, I did eventually arrive home a little over a week ago, in the middle of the afternoon on Friday after about two days of travel. I got home, stayed up long enough to say “Hi” to my family and give them some presents, and then passed out right after supper, sleeping through.

And that’s kind of the story of the last week–mostly me falling asleep WAAAAY earlier than I normally do. Which, when combined with an unusually heavy workloadI have my normal work, two weeks of which just piled up while I was in Australia, plus the work I brought home from Australia, plus a few extra bonus items arising from where we are in the release cycle of my main product., and a strong desire to spend time with my family after my trip, explains why there’s been nothing here for a week. And, for a bonus, Friday I felt a cold kicking in, which is just adding to my whole “no energy situation”–at least this time it’s not the Down Under Death Flu, so I should be able to kick in in less than an eon.

A quick rundown:

Saturday afternoon was spent getting ready for Trish’s birthday on Sunday. I think I did pretty well on gifts this year, with my favourite find being a bracelet from a swanky Beverly Hills designer that I thought was just exactly right for Trish. Who says you can’t shop the world in Halifax?

(As part of this process I actually learned what sterling silver is–which is good, because I had foolishly thought that ‘sterling’ meant ‘not really’, like ‘Corinthian’ in Corinthian leather, or to take an example from book world that still angers me, the ‘bonded’ in “bonded leather“.) I think I managed to stay awake until around 8pm.

Sunday was the actual birthday, and was lots of family fun. Trish, expensive date that she is, wanted her dinner at the Armview, which is a favourite of both her and Sarah. We did that, then dropped Sarah off with a sitter to attend the Women Fully Clothed show, which had it’s one night in Halifax fortuitously scheduled on Trish’s birthday. Trish laughed a lot, I laughed a few times–not that I didn’t find it funny, but just that the humour was really targeted at women. (It was kind of odd to look around the Cohn, fully packed, and see around 20 guys in the audience. Fortunately the humour was mostly women making fun of themselves, not hating on men, because if gender war had broken out in that theatre, no men would have survived.)

I managed to stay awake until the end of the show, but was already falling asleep on the drive home.

Monday I took off work, to spend with the family, since Trish was starting her month of PhD comprehensive exams on Tuesday, and I wanted to see her before she went into heavy work mode for all of February. One of the things we did was have a family movie day, on which I will have more to say in a later post.

Tuesday I managed to stay up decently late, for my first poker night with the boys in a several weeks. Apparently the combination of highly caffeinated beverages, hard cider, and circadian disrythmia work for me, since I was kind of dominating the table all night.

The rest of the week, up to and including last night, are an embarrassing series of nights, on each of which I proudly claimed that the jet lag was over and that I am about to return to my regular schedule and then proceeded to fall asleep incredibly early compared to my normal state.

Now that I have a full scale cold I suspect it will be a few more days before I finally do actually get back in my groove, but I’ve decided that I can at least catch up with the blog while I’m getting it together.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.