I'm quite tired these days. The kids have to be at summer camp an hour earlier than they do at school, and I'm the one who takes them to there, so that means I have to wake up and hour earlier. You might think this would force me to go to bed an hour earlier, but it doesn't. It just means I get an hour less sleep. I find it almost physically impossible to go to sleep before midnight on a regular basis (and many nights it is significantly later than that). I can do it for a little while, or as a one-off "catch up" night, but sure as the setting sun I will eventually regress into my night-owl habits.
It's been that way my entire adult life. One summer as a college student, I worked stocking shelves at a sporting goods store, which required me to wake up at 5:00 am. The night before my first day, I got in bed around 9:00 pm set on getting a solid eight-hours of shut-eye. I laid there for about 20 minutes, listening to the birds chirp, hearing the comings and goings of my neighbors (it wasn't even totally dark out), before thinking, Well, this isn't going to work, and getting up to play Nintendo. I don't think I slept more than five hours a night that entire summer.
I would, however, often nap in the afternoon on the couch after I came home. It's the only time in my life I napped regularly. It was different sleep than I got at night though. It was like the sleep I sometimes get on airplanes, where I'm kinda still following what's going on, but it's not what's actually going on. It's some sort of dream-reality hybrid. At some point it all gets too weird and I pop back into full consciousness -- except on rare occasions, when I don't, and I experience sleep paralysis. This is an absolutely terrifying state in which one is awake but cannot move or speak. I don't think there is a literal Hell, but if there is, I imagine it somehow involves sleep paralysis.
S is the type of person who can fall asleep almost immediately in almost any environment, so she doesn't really understand my plight (and, I suspect, is frequently annoyed by it). "Why don't you just go to sleep earlier?" she asks. I try to explain that that's like telling a fat person to just eat less and exercise more: Gee, thanks, I never thought of that. But it works out okay, because she usually lets me sleep in a little on the weekend, and I always rally and get out of bed when I need to, no matter how tired I am. On Monday, I got the kids to school, put in a full day at the office, and took a Krav class on about an hour of sleep.
This is not an exaggeration. Sunday night* I got caught in the death-spiral in which you can't sleep because you are anxious and you are anxious because you can't sleep. At one point, I got up to get water and peeked at the clock (which I typically try to avoid, as it only makes things worse) and it was 4:00 am on the dot. I went back to bed and finally slept until S's alarm went off a little after 5:00. I could not get back to sleep after that, around 6:30 I resigned myself to that fact and just got up for the day -- a one-hour sleep night. I've had them before, and they totally suck. Somehow I manage to power through, though, and I almost always sleep soundly the next night.
*Monday morning, technically.
In other news, we apparently stumbled into a free lawn care service. When we first moved to this house, over two years ago, we signed up to get our grass mowed every two weeks by the same company who does our neighbors' yards. It's $40 a pop, so we paid the main guy cash on the spot the first few times he came over to do it. But then he quit coming and instead sent his workers, who said they don't handle the money and wouldn't take payment from us. Since then, we just haven't paid. They still come every week, but we don't give them any money. It's the weirdest thing.
It's also annoying, because we are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. We probably owe them like $1,000. I'd say they cut our lawn at least 25 times since we last paid. I was keeping track for a while, but I've now lost count. Are we going to get hit with a huge bill soon? I mean, it's been like two years. A few weeks ago I sent him a text asking him to send us an invoice, and he replied asking for our address, so I sent it to him, and then... nothing. How can you run a business this way? Don't you need the cash flow? How do you pay your employees? Is this a front business for some sort of shady activity?
Whatever the case, it makes me feel uncomfortable, but I don't know what to do. I could cancel the service, but if he's not responsive to getting paid, I doubt he'll be responsive to not getting paid. Also, they do a really good job and are super reliable (ironic, given how many negative experiences we've had with contractors we were paying). I think I'm going to ask my neighbors what they do. If they don't give me a satisfactory response, then I'm going to write a check and just give it to a worker the next time I see one. Either that or I'll just do nothing and wait until a huge bill comes due... or doesn't. Maybe we will move or die first, in which case -- we win? I dunno. I really can't figure this one out.
Until next time...
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