The Earliest Bird...

Clearly, I am having an off week.

Yesterday I woke up at 4am, extremely worn out from decorating for Christmas the previous afternoon. I ached and my stomach felt weird. With the way I was feeling, I thought it best to call in sick. I never like using my sick days, but I always seem to use them all plus 1 or 2 more by the end of the school year. I wrote out lesson plans and emailed them to the school at 5am. Then I went back to bed, not feeling well, and not sleepy enough to sleep.

By 9am, my nephew had been dropped at my mom's house. I went over there for about an hour, but I still didn't feel well and came home. I sat in my chair in the sunroom and fell asleep. The sunshine really helped.

Two hours later, I decided to shower. I was feeling better. As soon as I was done I got a call from Best Buy, my laptop was ready to be picked up. I had dropped it off 10 days before with a corrupted hard drive. The good news is that I got $130 back because it was a hardware problem, not the result of something I had installed. More good news is that they were able to back up all of my data on my external hard drive, so, technically, nothing has been lost. The bad news is that I needed a new hard drive.

So, essentially, the laptop was returned to me in the condition as if I had just bought it, with nothing on it. It is like moving into a new house. I made some progress on it last night, but I haven't even touched the stuff on the external hard drive yet, and I don't even want to think about what this is going to do to my Zune player. I am going to have to put everything that was on it back into the Zune software exactly as it is on my player, otherwise the synchronization will get all messed up.

And then the kicker...

I fell asleep at 8:30 (thrilled that I would get a good night's sleep to return to work today refreshed...)

Then I woke up at 11:45 and I've been up since then. I tried and tried to fall back asleep and could not. I read, got very sleepy, and turned the light off 3 times, then would rouse awake and start the cycle again.

I really did try. By 3:30am it was getting pointless and I could feel myself getting more and more anxious as the minutes ticked by. That certainly wasn't going to help me sleep, and it was too late to take a sleeping pill. I reluctantly called in another sick day and emailed plans for today's sub. It is a mad, helpless feeling. I would be useless on 3 hours sleep and yet I hate the thought of having to use another sick day. I try so hard space them out throughout the year and this year has not worked out that way.

So, here it is, 5:21am, and I've been at various stages of being awake since 11:45 last night. I guess I'll go and read again and see if I can fall asleep now...