Out of Synch

It's 4.30 in the morning, and instead of being worn out and wanting to crawl into bed I am wide awake and raring to go. This is not a usual state of affairs for me, whether I'm up at 4.30 because I haven't gone to bed yet or because I've got up early for some reason. Particularly if I've got up early. But there is a perfectly normal explaination. I've spent about 18 of the past 24 hours sleeping, so it's hardly surprising that my body's not asking for more.

This weekend has been the first for quite a while that I haven't had extra-curricular stuff to get on with- last week it was making the butterfly wings, which kept me up to the small hours, on Friday evening, followed by the demo on Saturday and then buying ingredients and making food for the Food Fair on Sunday (and much of Monday). Before that it was preparing for the Climate Change Awareness Week Quiz*. Before that, I was at home for the weekend so got a fair bit of a lie in. Today, I didn't set my alarm but slept untill I naturally woke up. That occurred at 4 in the afternoon. You might think that was a result of weeks of missed sleep, since I've been getting 6 hours on a good night and 4 most of the time, but actually 4 in the afternoon is always when I naturally wake up if left to my own devices. Sometimes I wonder how I would have coped in the pre-alarm clock ages. I didn't get to bed till about 3am though so it's not quite as bad as it sounds, though it is pretty bad.

I then went down to Tesco to get some food, at about 5, by which time it was already dark. I came back and made myself a late lunch of egg mayonnaise sandwiches using toasted bread, then, amazingly, actually felt tired again and got into bed fully clothed (well, it was quite cold) and after reading for a while went to sleep again- for only 6 hours this time. I then went to the kitchen, washed up my backlog of dirty dishes (I've been stashing them on top of the cupboards so at least they won't get in anyone's way), and made some supper- somehow, no matter how much of the day I miss through sleep, I've never been able to accept the idea that I should cut my meals down to less than two (I don't mind missing breakfast and indeed do so fairly often even when I'm up bright and early- yes, I do know that's not a good idea). I had two eggs hardboiled, cut in half and covered with mayonnaise, which is something I'd been craving for a few days, in spite of a voice telling me that it really wasn't wise to have more eggs and mayonnaise after having them for lunch, and saying wasn't it true that one wasn't supposed to eat more than one egg a day? I told it that I hadn't had any eggs at all on many days and it all averaged out. It wasn't quite happy but gave in. With the eggs I had a quarter of a broccoli quiche that I'd got in Tesco's on my earlier trip (which felt like it was on another day), knowing I wouldn't want to do any complicated cooking, and some salad that I made up using spinach, sweetcorn, beetroot, grated carrot, artichoke hearts and olives with a dressing of oil, balsamic vinegar, chopped garlic and mustard. Very nice, but I had to suffer for it: the sweetcorn and beetroot were saved from a similar salad I had yesterday- there's much more sweetcorn in a tin than I want to use in one portion, so I froze the rest with the remainder of the beetroot I boiled- I did more than I needed on purpose as I knew I'd be having the same again soon. So I was trying to get some of the sweetcorn and beetroot off while it was all still frozen as I didn't really want to thaw the rest if I didn't have to- it'd mean it wasn't really hygienic to refreeze it. And at one point the fork slipped onto my finger. I thought "Is that beetroot juice?" but the amount was increasing and I realized it was blood. I hadn't felt anything to begin with as my finger was cold from the frozen vegetables, but as it warmed up it started to hurt quite a lot. It took a few hours to stop bleeding, in spite of my keeping some loo roll tightly wound round it. And that was as exciting as my day got!

*I'd like to promise that'll be the last time I type the words 'Climate Change Awareness Week' on these pages^, but sadly I wouldn't feel confident of being able to keep such a promise...

^The last time apart from in that comment, that is