Tag: night shift

Sleep? Nah who needs that?

Sleep, who needs that?

I do….

In my endless search for something relevant to chat about, I have today stumbled upon the topic of sleep. As I am just not getting enough of it.

Insomniacs of the world unite and lift those drowsy heads.

I know my problem, well I think I do. I am a shift worker of 30+ years now, and in 30 years I’ve never been successful at managing the transition from working nights to doing the day shift. It’s now 06:20 on Monday morning and I finished my long run of night shifts at 6am last Friday, 72hrs ago. I’m about to go into work to start another “productive “ week.

So I’m finishing at 6am, I sleep until about 1pm and then I’m up, do what I have to do and then head for bed about 10pm feeling sufficiently tired and all prepared for a good night sleep. That isn’t going to happen tonight though is it? A little voice in my head decides that at 2am it is a good time to wake up, and wouldn’t you know it, I’m now wide awake.

I’ve been a tad stressed lately as well and that contributes, I’ve had some medical issues develop that are also compounding things but in the greater context, I’m struggling to understand just what the issue is. Oh, and physical activity has also dwindled somewhat lately.

At 2am I fish out my headphones and put Spotify on my phone to listen to some relaxing sounds that guarantee to have me asleep in minutes, excellent, I’ll have some of that.

Two hours later and I am still awake, what I have just listened to sounds vaguely similar to the music you’d expect to hear in a funeral parlour, at times I felt as if I was the cadaver just lying there for my family to inspect. Weird, so I won’t be using that again!

Sometime between funeral introspective time and daylight I must have drifted off for a while, as I was woken with a cup of tea and my wife questioning why I had headphones on. Last night was not much better as we had a windy night here and one of the neighbours gates was banging about causing me to wake up, just as I’d drifted off. I’ll casually mention that today to him with the polite suggestion that if it is not sorted out, my cranky self will probably nail the F***er shut so it doesn’t happen again. I’m sure he will sort it out, once again restoring neighbourly calmness and balance.

Over the 30 years or so of working shifts, I have tried probably, every way of trying to transition from nights to days, and it just doesn’t work, for me at least. If I get up too early to try and force my body to tire early, the wife says I get cranky, if I don’t sleep on the first day of transition at all, I apparently become one of the living dead. I just can’t win.

I’ve probably answered my own questions in the paragraph above, and I requote:

I’ve been a tad stressed lately as well and that contributes, I’ve had some medical issues develop that are also compounding things but in the greater context, I’m struggling to understand just what the issue is. Oh, and physical activity has also dwindled somewhat lately.

There it is. How do you manage that transition, as I’m all out of ideas? I can address some of the above but I just need to manage my days better to achieve things, but work gets in the way. Shift work is a silent killer in my eyes, as Johnny cash once sang: “I l owe my soul to the company store”

And to quote another song, “ I can’t get no sleep”

I’m knackered.

Have a super day. Sleep well.

The best laid plans and all that…

It’s just gone four in the morning, the birds are awakening and I’m stuck in an office in Leicestershire awaiting my next call out of this long night shift.

Despite weather reports being favourable it has been heaving down with rain for the past few hours , and it doesn’t look as if it’s going to let off at any time today.

It’s a rainy night in Leicestershire

This is pretty much a post about gardening, another activity I like to get involved in, and at the moment I have a project underway that was pretty much weather dependent.

I have begun the digging out of a small part of the garden in preparation for laying a small patio area. Our garden is pretty much clay based under the grass and to be honest as a result of that drainage is not brilliant. We never used to have issues with drainage due to there being 12 trees in situ that the previous owner had planted, he never looked after them and they became diseased. These sucked every bit of moisture from the garden and never gave us any issues with pooling water.

Turf removal
Digging out

Fast forward a couple of years and those trees had to be removed due to the aforementioned disease, right down to the roots. Now during the normal British rain season ( most of the year ) we have pools developing around the garden. We are replanting a number of smaller trees but it’s going to be some time before they are drinking the quantities of rain water we usually get here in the East Midlands.

I chose this week to do my digging as it was forecast to be the driest week in a while and there was a sufficient chance of me getting all the digging done and getting the sub base in place before any inclement weather arrived.

I sit here this morning cursing so called weather forecasts.

I have been doing work between night shifts spreading it out and was so pleased with progress thus far. I removed all turf yesterday and today started digging out to about 15 c/m and started to level the area out. All excess soil was being spread around the flower beds of the front and rear garden so nothing was going to waste at all.

I stopped work on the garden at about 4 pm yesterday, well happy with progress telling the wife I had about another 2 days of work to do on levelling before we could start to get the sub base in place and compacted prior to paving, hopefully the job would be completed by next Sunday.

That’s not going to happen.

Looking at my security camera in the garden I can see that the patio area has now taken on the look of a pond and later today I half expect to see a couple of ducks taking residence.

The moral of this story is , weather forecasts don’t work. It’s not yet an art despite all the technological advances over the years.

Check progress here: The best laid plans and all that…Pt2

And don’t tell the wife when the job will be finished as she’s now got me tied to that timescale and I know now that is not going to be achieved.

I am a fool

Stay happy people. You are so special.