Burning the Candle at Both Ends

I apologize for the rather odd post the other day that basically consisted of an observation and a joke. There really was supposed to be more content. The problem was, I fell asleep with my hands on the keyboard and woke up a couple of hours later.

Since I've been pretty committed to publishing on a regular basis I just hit "publish post" at that point, turned off the computer, rolled over and went back to sleep. (I write on my laptop, sitting up in bed for the most part. Sounds odd, but it works for me! Well, usually.)

Last night was even worse. I was still reading other people's blogs and it was at least an hour before I usually go to sleep but I started dropping off. So I did what is, for me, the unthinkable. I went to sleep without posting.

I woke up an hour early this morning and just started my normal routine that much earlier. And here I am, getting in a post before I leave for work! I'd love to be able to sit and write during the day, but I have 3 little girls bouncing around and the baby likes to climb up and push random buttons. Sometimes she even manages to hit a vital one before I can scoop her up, move her away and distract her with food or a toy.

I spent 45 minutes one day restoring my computer after she got on the keyboard while I was taking a 2 minute bathroom break. The bigger girls were on the computer, playing games in Webkinz but they couldn't stop Super Baby. She was intent on her task, which seemed to involve going into my administrative passwords and changing them! No mean feat, since I wasn't even logged on as admin when I left. Luckily she wasn't able to replicate her new password, so she didn't manage to permanently lock me out of my own system but she put up a valiant effort and, using some interesting key combination as I came into the room, she managed to prevent Windows from being able to reboot. You can see why I don't do much in the way of posting when the little ones are downstairs.

My own 5 yo Dear Child isn't as much of a problem. She'll probably be starting her own blog when she no longer needs to ask me how to spell every other word but her damage to the computer itself is pretty much confined to getting crumbs in the keyboard because she's eating and typing at the same time.

Anyway that pretty much explains why I generally write between about 11 pm and 2 am. It's not that I want to burn the candle at both ends (really, I'm not as young as I used to be and it's getting harder to do) but there are only so many hours in a day. I get up early (and I'm a night owl, not a morning person), daven [pray], do Chitas [religious learning] for about 1/2 an hour, eat, walk Dog and go to work. Some days I work all day, the others I put in an hour or 2 and come home to spend the day with the girls (ages 5, 3 and 1). We have dinner when Hubby comes home and then I go back to the office for the evening. I do groceries, buy gas, etc. on the way home, spend some time with Hubby and then I start writing.

If I didn't keep Shabbat and have that total break from the regular world one day a week I'd probably go bonkers. I believe it was Herman Wouk who described Shabbat as an "island in time" and I love that phrase. I find I can generally keep going so long as I know the Shabbat is coming soon and I'll have time to recharge. It's just that occasionally at some point in between I need to get more than 4 hours sleep.

My next challenge is going to be that we are planning to go away to our other house for a few days. I hope we're leaving tomorrow, in fact. Since we don't have internet there (I have to drive 20 minutes to town to use the free wifi at Safeway) it will be challenging to continue posting on a regular schedule. Believe me, I won't be sitting outside Safeway every night at 2 am! I've been experimenting a bit with Blogger's new scheduling feature, but it hasn't worked consistently for me so we'll see. If you see 3 or 4 posts appear all at once you'll know what's happened, right?

Edit: I just tried to post this for about 1/2 hour in the future and got an error message. Luckily, I was able to retrieve the auto-saved draft of the article, although it had added extra blank lines between all the paragraphs. So, scheduling is not working too well....