Kevin's Weblog

I’m definitely more tired today, after dropping to 4.5 hours of sleep last night. It comes and goes, at some points in the day I’ve been completely exhausted, and other times I feel just fine. It doesn’t seem to be closely correlated to my nap times, either. I’m thinking I should start keeping notes of when I’m tired and when I’m alert and see if a pattern arises. Potentially, it’s about that time each day and I should adjust my nap times accordingly.

I did have two naps today, at about 10:30 and 5:30, and they were pretty deep, although I still had that mid-nap wakeup during the first one. Unlike a lot of people, I haven’t been particularly consistent about where I’m napping. Based on what else is going on in the house, I switch between upstairs in our bedroom and downstairs in the guest room. The same is true for my core sleep, although I’ve mostly been sleeping in the guest room to avoid interruptions. If I start oversleeping my naps, I might have to re-evaluation this, but for the moment, this particular bit of advice doesn’t seem to apply to me.

One other thing that I’d been meaning to mention, and was reminded of by Toad008’s last post is that in addition to quitting caffeine, I’m also refraining from alcohol entirely as well. I don’t expect this to be permanent, but I figure that the last thing my body needs at this point is a depressant. This hasn’t been too tough, particularly since I made a point to stop buying beer and wine a few weeks in advance and to drink up what we had in the house. So, at home there’s not really anything for me to drink. Most of the geek gatherings happen at pubs around here, but it looks like we’ll be out of town for most of them this month, so there won’t be any temptation there either.

Finally, I took a walk this morning while everyone was still asleep. It was pretty neat to just stroll down Hawthorne with no crowds or traffic, and I kept going a ways past where we usually walk, so I got to check out a bunch of shops that I didn’t know existed before.

One of the things that I’m really liking about this area of Portland is the number of second-run movies theaters. There’s 4 of them within a mile of our house, and it’s hard to imagine why I would bother going to the first-run places. Walking distance, and you can get ticket, pizza, and beer for the normal price of admission; what’s not to like!

This weekend has been more of a challenge socially than physically. While working during the week, it was easy to remember to nap, but both days this weekend I nearly forgot to schedule it in. On Saturday, I made plans in the morning to meet friends at 2, then remembered I was supposed to be napping then, and had to move it a little earlier. Today, I was about to head out the door for the afternoon with the little one, when I realized I needed to nap. I imagine this will become more habitual.

Tonight I’m going to try dropping down to 4.5 hours. For the last week with 6 hours, I’ve been somewhat tired, but managing. I don’t feel like there’s any real adaptation happening, though. I’ve noticed in the past that much of the time, 6 hours of solid sleep is at least as good for me as 8 hours of semi-interrupted sleep. So, it doesn’t surprise me too much that this week hasn’t been enough to force any real change in my sleep cycles. And, I’m still having this weird wakeup in the middle of most of my naps. So, I’m going to push a little harder in hopes that changes start to happen.

My big concern at the moment is that it looks like we’re going back to LA at the end of this week. When I decided on this timeline, I thought this trip wasn’t going to happen, but now it’s back on. We’re probably going to be down there for about 2 weeks and I imagine it’s going to be a bit tough to keep on schedule, particularly without having all the normal stuff to amuse myself with when I’m trying to not sleep.