I know most of y'all are watching the big sportsball thing tonight. Since I don't care about either team (if I followed football at all, I'd root for the Broncos) or the commercials, I'm going to do a little personal whining tonight.
We are a titch over halfway through this year's legislative session here in New Mexico (it's a 30-day session and ends on the 19th at noon). This year I've drawn the short straw and have been working the 7:30 am-4:30 pm shift during the week (the hours are a little different on the weekends). This is when my alarm has been going off:
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| Lynne Cantwell 2025 |
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I have been a night owl for as long as I can remember. All those novels I churned out? Most of the time, I was writing them into the wee hours. (My mother said when I was a tiny child, I would wake up with the birds, but I think she was lying.)
Of course, as a productive member of society (aka a cog in the machine of commerce), I have worked all kinds of crazy shifts, necessitating a sleep schedule all over the clock. For example, the most desirable shift in radio is morning drive time, which means you have to be on the air, sounding coherent, at 6:00 am. And that means you have to be there earlier than that to call the cop shops for any news overnight and write your first newscast. For my first job in radio, I was still living with my parents, driving 35 miles each way to the radio station. I started working there in January. In northern Indiana. Sometimes I followed the snowplows down US 35, and sometimes they followed me.
The weirdest shift I ever had was probably when I wrote for the morning show for the Fox TV affiliate in DC; I had to be in at midnight and left work around 8:00 am or 9:00 am (which was No Fun with Small Children -- try finding a babysitter to come and sleep at your house, just in case the place starts burning down or something).
My favorite shift was always 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. I could sleep in 'til 8 or 8:30, get in a full workday, and have a life after I got off work.
Then I made the move to the legal world. The big law firm had a pretty sweet policy for staff: You could name your own start time (within a certain window), as long as the lawyers you supported were cool with it. The big-picture reason was to help with DC's legendary traffic congestion, but it was helpful for staff, too. When the girls were in school, I started earlier; when they went away to college, I switched to 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. When we lived in Potomac Yard, I could sleep 'til 7:00 am, have breakfast at home, and still get to work on time.
Then I retired, and my schedule was my own... until I started working for the legislature.
During the interim, we work 8:00 am to 5:00 pm; the 6:15 am alarm for that is bad enough when my body clock is telling me to stay up past midnight. But for this session, I'm working the dreaded 7:30 am shift.
For weeks, maybe months, I've been dozing off in the afternoons and falling asleep in front of the TV in the evenings. I thought maybe it was sleep apnea or something worse. Then one evening recently, I crashed. Just could not keep my eyes open any longer. Went to bed at 8-ish and slept almost ten hours. The next day I wasn't sleepy at all.
I wasn't sick. I was sleep-deprived.
Well, fuck.
So now I'm making a concerted effort to get in bed before 10, so that when the 5:45 am alarm goes off, it's not too painful to get up right away. And I guess when session is over, I'll have to give up my post-midnight lifestyle. Damn it.
Someday I will be retired again. I am looking forward to it.
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These moments of early-to-bed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Less than two weeks to go...
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