Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Tuesday

It's been a really stressful week. Yesterday, after texting with my brother (he's got an infection in his leg that he had been ignoring), I got a horrible migraine and had to lie down and cover my eyes for a few hours until my head stopped hurting. We had planned to go to dinner with Judi and didn't want to cancel, so even though I still wasn't feeling great, we went out anyway. We had Mexican food and then went and helped her set up a Netflix account at her house so that Paul can also watch on his iPad at the assisted living place.

We were supposed to have gone out to dinner with my brother and mother tonight, but my brother wasn't feeling well enough to go, so that got canceled. Instead, Dave is going to go help Paul set up Netflix and I'm going to stay here and do laundry.

I tried to stay up a little last night and failed pretty miserably. I've got to work two graveyard shifts this week and last week I was really in trouble at the end of my shift because I wasn't able to sleep before going in. This week, I thought I'd start a couple of days before and stay up as late as possible one night (that was supposed to be last night, but I ended up only staying up a little while) and then, the next night (tonight), try to stay up all night. I got some sleep today (not great quality, because there was a lot of ambient noise both outside and inside and my neck and shoulder are really bugging me today). I finally got up around 3:30 or so. Now I'll try to stay up as late as possible to tire myself out so that I can sleep all day tomorrow and get up at 5:30 to be at work at 7:00. Sigh. I don't know how sustainable working graveyards is going to be in the long term, but I prefer it, so I'm going to give it as good a try as I can.

While I've been relaxing/sleeping, I've been listening to Meditation/Wellness podcasts from the MARC-UCLA app on my phone. (MARC I think stands for "meditation and relaxation center") and, when I'm not listening to those podcasts, I've been listening to audiobooks on youtube, which is great. I finished To Kill a Mockingbird and now am listening to a version of Pride and Prejudice, which I've never read. (I always found it too tedious to get through, like an historical version of Gilmour Girls.) I'm liking having it read to me, however. The woman reading it goes a bit too fast, but whatever. Hard to argue with a free audiobook. I also bookmarked a version of some Sherlock Holmes stories as read by Benedict Cumberbatch and P.G. Wodehouse's Carry On Jeeves. (I like the Jeeves stories and read them all when I was in my early 20s.)

I found a curious thing: While listening to the podcasts on my phone, I found that if I listen through my left ear, that my brain just never shuts up, it just keeps chattering about whatever is worrying me of causing me to feel stressed out and anxious. But that if I listen through my right ear only, my brain mostly shuts up. I can concentrate on whatever I'm listening to and completely ignore what my brain is telling me that I need to perseverate on. Strange, right? But it works, so I'm using it to my advantage to give myself a break from having to think about the same stressful thing over and over and over and over.

Anyway, now I'm up, drinking coffee. I started to sew some, but after sewing two things together wrong and then trimming something so that it was *really* wrong, I just put away my sewing and started doing some laundry.

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