Fall

I'm wiped out.

I like working nights, but they can be long. The twelve and a half hours that span 7 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. include some of the longest hours in the day. (People who routinely sleep through those hours maybe don't know that those hours are longer than other hours, so I'm telling you what I know from experience, both as someone who works those hours and as someone who has been an incurable insomniac since early childhood.)

I've been working with the littlest children these past weeks. They're easy to work with mentally but exhausting physically. (Whereas the older children are easier physically but more difficult for me mentally.)  At the hospital, all the children regardless of age have a 9 p.m. bedtime. Surprisingly, the older ones generally go right to sleep and sleep through the night. The younger ones have a harder time settling down and if they're going to wake in the night, it's going to happen often and every night.

We also had admissions each and every night I work. Usually the child has been in the emergency room for hours and hours and then end up getting transferred to the hospital where I work between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. Working up an admission at the end of a long shift is not fun. Everyone is exhausted, patient included, and we try to divide and conquer the work to get the poor kid in bed as soon as possible.

I came home and got a little sleep, maybe four hours. Dave had gone to an appointment, so I woke up in the early afternoon to a nearly empty casita (just me and the cat). When he got home, he had the mail with him and I took pity on the poor folks at The New Yorker who send us about fifteen emails and four pieces of junk mail a week, begging us to resubscribe, so we did, got a year subscription (and a free tote, natch) for, like forty-five bucks. Then I got online and ordered a trio of books, two are essays byand interviews with Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese animator, and one is the art of one of his films, My Neighbor Totoro. (I am in love with Totoro.) I bought those books on the strength of this quote alone:

"You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two."

After some online retail therapy, I had real therapy, a FaceTime therapy meeting with my Jungian therapist. Then I sat down and did about a minute and a half of sewing. My thread kept breaking, which is frustrating. Sometimes it's a tension issue. Sometimes it's a needle issue. Sometimes it's the thread.  In this case, I think it's the spool; sometimes you get one, especially if it's 100% cotton thread, that's in bad shape from improper storage (Amazon is particularly bad about this) and you can't really tell until you try to use it and it just keeps breaking on you. The stuff I like is about $13 a spool, so throwing out a bad spool sucks, but oh, well.  I changed out the top thread but need to wind some bobbins before I can get started again.

Later:

Dave and I just got in from dinner with Chris and Grace. We haven't seen them in a long time, since the end of July probably. We went for dim sum and had a really fun time, despite all of us being various degrees of tired from work.

Dave and I came home the long way, via giant fizzy drinks and a drive through the valley with the windows rolled down and some favorite music on the radio.