Awake, part damn and blast

There is an especial poignancy to being awake at 3:30 on a day when I need to rise at 5:00.

One of these years I will learn to go to bed eight hours before I need to get out of bed, on days when I will be travelling. Not that this would help me now, of course, but it might generally be a useful thing to do.

As I mentioned last time, I am indeed about to fly to Malta for a short week (until Saturday) for a real-life meeting of Susan's Second Life meditation group. But I'm too damned tired to tell you about that. I must somehow get back to sleep.

[Updated nine hours later] I did manage to sleep another hour, rose at 5am, was at the airport at 6:22, and went to the gate to wait for my flight. And waited and waited and waited. And waited some more. Until finally at 9:15, two hours and ten minutes after it should have departed, the flight was cancelled. Stood in line for nearly two hours to rebook my tickets, got an evening flight on Air Malta. Now briefly home for breakfast and gathering a few things I forgot, before my sure-to-be-delightful six hour layover in FFM. Bah bloody humbug. Two inches of snow and the country grinds to a halt.

Broken

I broke a molar two days ago, while eating a carraway seed roll. A piece of tooth the size of a small pea broke off, and is now lying on my kitchen windowsill. I'm not quite sure why I put it there, I do know that it can't just be glued back in place, but throwing it out felt wrong. (As far as I can reconstruct the events, a seed got wedged between teeth and acted as a tiny crowbar when I bit down.) It doesn't hurt, which makes me vaguely uneasy even as I am thankful.

At this point, I have to interrupt myself to give some backstory. We have two more weeks to get the tender documents written and published, and are working insanely long and hard at it. Last week set a kind of sad record: 67.5 hours at work. That amount of concentrated effort doesn't just wash off during the twelve-minute walk home downhill, not even when I see an urban fox trotting down the empty street before me at 1 a.m. as has happened twice now. Even at 2 a.m. it takes me at least an hour of tea and/or yoghurt and/or reading, to relax enough to be able to go to bed. I haven't been in Second Life in a week, I find that too strenuous after working so long and hard.

I had a great deal of difficulty getting to sleep that night, between worry about the tooth and residual stress from overwork. I lay in bed half-awake, my mind whirling in a strange paranoiac-critical state that I would not hesitate to describe as delusional if it had happened while I was awake and functional*. I found myself in conversation with the dentist, in affect not "imagining" the meeting so much as remembering something that hadn't happened yet. She said that the tooth was irreparable and must be removed, and suggested an implant.

I asked her whether it was worth all that bother and expense, "given that I am not going to be alive much longer."

Well.

That shook me awake, really awake. I was so disturbed that I considered getting up again and going online to talk to some friends who I knew (hoped) would be there. I talked myself down from the horror, telling myself it was just a moment of madness caused by overwork and exhaustion (true enough), and managed to go to sleep after a half-hour of reading.

Where the hell did that idea come from? On the one hand, I never thought that I would ever live to be as old as I am now (not that I expected to die, I just didn't think I would age), and I have certainly always lived as though life and youthful strength would be infinitely available; on the other hand, I was told by a reputedly infallible reader of tea-leaves in Boston that I would live to be 88. (She also said that I would be successful and happy but not rich, which so far is running 100%.)

And now, the punchline. Once this set of documents is finished, we'll have a few weeks' off. I was thinking about a trip to Israel, and had got as far as mailing some friends to pick dates and places. Right now, it looks like I will be giving my holiday fund to the dentist instead. Damn.


* Ignoring for the moment that one definition of being awake and functional is not being in a delusional state.

Not sleeping

I believe that I slept about three hours, but somehow I can't be sure. Usually one can tell whether one slept or merely lay in bed, at least I usually can, but I have no idea whether I slept or not. Damn, I knew that I should have got up at 9 a.m. when the alarm rang, rather than rolling over for "another ten minutes" and sleeping four more hours.

Taken a Baldrian, waiting for the hot chocolate to cook. I am hoping that our first project meeting in Rose Street will be this afternoon rather than at say 9 a.m., i.e. that G will not call in 2.5 hours to wake me.

That is all.

[Updated: I slept nine hours after posting that. Unfortunately, they were the hours between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. Not quite right.]

Oral fun

Went to the dentist this morning for the third stage of the treatment (previously cleaning, and replacing a broken-off bit on the right). A gold crown that was put on X years ago came unsealed (without falling out) and the tooth started decaying below it; because of the softening, the tooth developed micro-cracks which are the reason why it hurt when I bit down on something hard with that tooth. The official statement is that we will give the tooth six months to stabilize, then see how bad the cracking is; depending on its condition, it will either get a new cap (to hold it together) or be replaced.

At home now with a pair of lips that don't close properly, a drill-induced throbbing headache, and a vague case of the blues. Bronchitis is much better, at least. I shall have today off to whine and moan, and start back at Rose Street on the translation tomorrow.

Historical accuracy compels me to note that I was awake, insomnified, this morning at 4 a.m., woken from happy dreams strangely enough; resisted the urge to get up, and fell asleep again after half an hour or so.

Damn but it's cold today, 2° C at present. Miso soup is called for, I think.

Public service announcement

Certain bodily disorders get better on their own if you ignore them. Dental problems do not. They will only get bigger and uglier and more painful and more expensive. If you think you might have a dental problem, then you do have one, so just bite the bullet and go see the dentist right now. Yes, it'll cost a few hundred bucks, but after you leave it four months it'll cost a few thousand bucks.

Guess what I did this afternoon?

Better than I had feared, but worse than I had hoped. Hey ho. And I got an electric sonic (oooh) toothbrush out of the deal.

Sunday, not in the park, without George

Not yet at least. If the weather holds fine, I shall walk down to the river this afternoon.

I bought a pair of pyjamas yesterday, the first that I've worn in thirty-three years if not longer (though I do wear a t-shirt in bed, and often socks, and in winter sometimes even long-johns). I got into the habit of sleeping naked when I was in Italy on a summer study session, learning how to drink alcohol and coffee and a few quite fascinating things about the human anatomy, and carried on until fairly recently. It was only after moving here that I started wearing t-shirts in bed, because of the miserably damp winters; they bothered me even more here than in London which is not known for aridity.

Interrupting myself for a moment: I have a Norman Stove*. The four burners and single oven are controlled by a total of six rotary knobs, and at least once a month I nearly burn the house down by turning the wrong one on. I've developed the habit of checking and counterchecking which burner is on, but this doesn't help when I turn the knob in the wrong direction, causing the water in the pot to boil away rapidly rather than simmering slowly—as I just did. The year is 2007 CE, nearly 2008. Why is this still so damned difficult? Do the people who make ovens never cook for themselves? Have they no wives or husbands or parents or children? Have they never even watched anyone cook anything? Or have they merely no commonsense? Bah.

So, yes: pyjamas. It was purely wonderful, I was toasty warm practically in the instant that I put them on cold from the drawer. Those were by far the best 30 Euros I've spent lately.

"Cold" being the operative word. The heating seems not to be working properly, apart from the living room = office and bathroom, the radiators appear not to be receiving any hot water from the boiler. I thought this might have been due to low water pressure, but having topped that up this morning I realize that it's not the case. Something is grievously wrong.

And how has your weekend been?

* Named for Donald A. Norman, useability expert and author of "The design of everyday things" (among other books), in which he discusses (among other things) the particularly egregious and all too common form of bad design that has come to be known as Norman doors: doors that cannot be opened by performing the visually-obvious operation. Things that don't work the way that their appearance indicates that they should, or whose appearance gives no clues to their workings, are now generically known as Norman Whatevers.

Run like hell

... because we aren't going to make it. We aren't going to get the drawings done on time. I'll be very lucky if we don't have to do an all-nighter (i.e. from tomorrow into Wednesday) to get the bugger halfways ready. Forty-five hours to go.

Damn damn damn and damn.

Twelve down, eighteen to go.

Reorganize

1. Mail from the Münstermeister expressing his unhappiness that I am working on a competition while doing his translation. I pointed out that I took on the competition out of sheer desperation during the three months it took him to make up his mind (slightly more politely expressed, of course).

2. Phone call from G expressing his eagerness to see me in the office today and tomorrow (a statutory holiday, by the way), hard at work on the competition.

3. Slept until 10:30 after being in Second Life until after 1am last night.

4. Spent most of the time since then reading blogs and might-be-relevant-someday technical documentation.

Does not compute. I shall have to make some changes in my lifestyle and timekeeping habits. To this end, I shall:

• Go to bed before midnight every night in November, and before 11pm every night in December.


• Get up at 7am (or earlier if I happen to wake) every morning in November, and at 6am in December.


• Spend the hours until lunchtime on the translation. Only e-mail reading is permitted before lunch; if you see me leaving comments on your blogs during the morning hours CET, please kick my stupid butt. (Actually, I found during last year's NaBloPoMo that the early morning was a good time to post; I might permit myself that this year too.)


• The hours from lunchtime to early evening belong to "other work": architecture, visiting clients or other projects at home.


• The hours between early evening and bed are free, to be spent on fun and amusement.

How's business, you ask?

Thought for the day: a business plan that includes the words "win the lottery" is not planning a business.

I've spent much of the last two days looking through online job-ads, and a disspiriting time it was too. There appears to be no market for the database toolkit software that I've spent the last five years learning. Much as people talk about continuing education and career flexibility and such, there appears to be only a tiny market for people without a computer science degree. And while the population is ageing rapidly, there is apparently no place in IT for people who are more than five years out of university.

I really don't know what to do.

Ageing Yuppie isn't answering mail or returning phone calls. I assume he wants to wait until he can tell me some good news, i.e. a job that starts "tomorrow morning," not realizing that the information "there's nothing before December at the earliest" would be nearly as useful.

The Münsters are still farting about. It appears that my contact there is only a middleman, that his company is offering translation services to someone else, and that this someone is being terminally indecisive.

G and U have been selected (drawn from the hat) for another competition, which we have already started and hope to have finished in mid-October, shortly before her baby is due. But that's like playing the lottery, I will be paid only a nominal amount (250 Euros) for my time.

I need to spend 5600 Euros to update my copy of the database toolkit to the newest version. Sales of my database and associated consultancy have earned me 2177 Euros so far this year.

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn and damn.

I shall now do the logical thing and walk downtown for a cappuccino before heading to the office for work on the competition. To leave you in a better mood, here's XKCD on romance and dating, a former ad executive who loves his job at Starbuks and nice short post by Jeffrey Zeldman on his daughter's first day of pre-school:

Nothing says Buddhism like raising a child. To cherish what has already changed as you look upon it. To hold most tightly what you must most let go.

[Updated: a kind of follow-up on the former-ad-executive story, about the store manager who hired him.]