Yet another Saturday spent at work. I can't complain, because I do it by choice to earn days off for vacations etc, but it still gets tiring. Since tomorrow is Mother's Day, Luis suggested that I work half a day today and half a day tomorrow, so that Deoscoidy could take a few hours off tomorrow to spend time with his family. We ended up not doing that, but the idea is an intriguing one that sounds like it would make a nice regular schedule — one weekend, you work Saturday and Sunday for 5 hours each, and the next weekend, you get one day off (say Friday). That way every other week you get a three-day weekend, and the weekends that you work aren't TOTALLY consumed by work, so it is still kind of like a free day. Of course, there's also the possibility of just working one full weekend shift one week and getting a day off the next. Each has their pros and cons. I guess the ideal setup would be to be able to pick between the two each week depending on your plans for the weekend. Hmm, I might have to run that idea past Luis sometime...

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When I walk down the hallway to the bathroom at work, some of the tiles in the false ceiling pop up and sometimes vibrate noisily as I walk past. I assume it has something to do with a vacuum created by the air conditioning system, and a pressure differential caused by my approach. But I can't help imagining it's an upside-down version of those creepy little things (apparently called Snatter Goblins) that rotate the paving stones when Sarah draws lipstick arrows on them in Labyrinth. And I don't like it.

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Working during the day means there is no longer a 12 hour communication delay between my boss and I, and so I'm kept more busy. However, it's not really all bad, because Luis tends to be quite happy with the work that I do, and so being given more projects means I get to receive more frequent praise for doing them well. So it ends up being sort of nice being able to get things done so quickly and get straight to the acknowledgement of my efforts :) Like a carrot on a stick. I am a simple being.

Bah, I managed to stay up until 11pm last night, but I'm still up at 5am and can't get back to sleep. I hate the feeling of impending doom, knowing that if I can't get back to sleep I'm going to be falling asleep towards the end of work, yet there's nothing I can do about it. The more you want to go to sleep, the harder it is. Oh well, I guess I should have known it wouldn't be that easy.

(Sung to the tune of Perfect Circle's 'A Stranger')

Nice things about working during the day:

• Sleeping in the dark (so nice! I should do this more often)
• Finally get to use my $75 Oakleys (what a stupid purchase, especially for someone who worked at night)
• Seeing other humans/Not feeling like I'm on the set of 28 Days
• Free mallorcas each morning (Ugh that would be bad long term)

Downsides:

• No longer have daytime hours free to do things like renew driver's license
• Daytime environment at work a little less laid back
• Can't just leave headlights on all the time, since I actually experience daytime driving now
• Other people in my bathroom stall!
• Traffic, I have not missed you.

Luis told me today that he's moving me back to the daytime shift starting next Monday. I'll be working 10am-8pm. It's weird, it's like this fundamental shift in my life. Everything I know will change again. And I'm not sure I like it. Sadly enough, I think I actually prefer the shift I have now. Right now, if I need to go to a store or get some work done on my car or whatever during the day, I can. When you're working during the day, you can't get anything done.

There's pros and cons, of course. Now it won't be a challenge to wake up early enough to go flying on Saturdays, so I can start doing that again. And hopefully I'll no longer be quite so familiar with the feeling of desperately trying to stave off sleep, which was what initially started my long descent into regular Starbucks patronage. It will be nice to have evenings free; now I can go to movies more often. It'll also be nice when friends come to visit, because friends statistically hang out much more often during the evenings than early mornings. I guess we'll see how it goes.

So today I ordered pizza (Domino's 3 pizzas for $5.55 each, mmm, way too much pizza). Since you have to have an electronic key to get to my office, standard practice is for the pizza guy to call when he arrives so we can go out and get the pizza. This guy apparently didnt know to do that, though. When I got a call on my cell phone, I assumed it'd be the pizza guy. But instead it was some woman who said (in Spanish), "Daniel? Are you expecting a pizza? The guy is out here and he's about to leave." Until this point, I figured it was the guard at the front desk calling. However, she continued in a surprised tone, "Are you here at atrium? What floor are you on? I ran all around the building looking for you but didn't find you. Anyway, you'd better get out here, the guy's about to leave. You owe me a slice of pizza."

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Ugh, this has been a difficult week. Andy, Donny, and Violet are down here for the week for their spring break, and as usual, I'm spending my nights working and my days hanging out with them, and carefully ignoring the missing third component, sleep. However, I've never been very good at this, so it just means that sleep encroaches upon all the other activities of my day like wine soaking through a tablecloth.

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