"Day Sleeping"

Throughout all of my growing-up years, a sign was attached to the doorbell of our flat in San Francisco. It said "Please knock. Day sleeping."

As I have explained before, my father worked as a railway mail clerk, in the days when they carried mail on special cars on the train. He would go to work in the afternoon of one day, work the mail through the night as the train ("The Lark") traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles, then spend the night at the Figueroa hotel in Los Angeles, near the train station, eat at The Pantry greasy spoon restaurant, get back n the train the next night and work the mail all the way back to San Francisco ("work the mail" means sorting it into various bags so it could be taken to the post office in LA and further sorted for delivery.) His job required that he stand up all night.

generic railway mail photo--not my father

Figueroa Hotel

The Pantry

He would get home around 9 in the morning, having worked all night, and would then go to bed for his 'night' of sleep.

He didn't do this every night. After a trip to LA he would be off for 2 days and then do it again, so it was two or three days a week when the sign was on the door.

But "day sleeping" meant not being able to be a kid. You didn't have friends over, you didn't play music, you didn't play anything but quiet games, you were hustled outside to play as often as possible. You prayed the phone didn't ring. And you hated the people who ignored the sign and rang the doorbell anyway.

"Day sleeping" meant that no matter what woke him up, it was somehow your fault ("your" being my mother, sister and myself) and there would be hell to pay, in the rage, followed by the silences (which were worse than the rages). The government didn't bring an end to the railway mail service until after I went away to college, so I lived my whole life with "day sleeping."

I can't imagine what hell it must have been for my mother having two children too young to understand the need to be quiet. A 4 year old and a newborn must have been great fun for her! I'm sure we spent a lot of time going for walks to the park!

As I continue to struggle with the effects of jet lag, I begin to understand ....a little... what it was like to be a "day sleeper." Last night I fell asleep sometime before 10 p.m., which meant I was wide awake at midnight. I then could not get back to sleep to save my soul until 5 a.m., which meant that by 10, I was ready for a nap. And then, waking up a bit after noon, I was only functional for half an hour and then back to sleep until 4 p.m. Essentially, I have slept the "night" away, yet it is 6 p.m. and my "morning" should be starting now. In fact, I was just out at the grocery store, along with all the students wandering aimlessly among the aisles wondering where canned lychees are, doing the week's shopping that I should have done in the morning with all the other stay at home parents and retired men and women.

The problem with "day sleeping" is that everybody else is going about their business normally and people who wouldn't dare call you at midnight think nothing of calling you sometime during the day. I have long said that I am convinced that there is some sort of connection between my eyelids and the telephone. All I have to do is doze off and the phone rings. There is one guy who seems to have ESP regarding my day sleeping. Invariably he calls just as I've begun my sleep. Or someone will call asking me to help save the musk ox or donate to the Society for the Heartbreak of Psoriasis.

When I am awakened after only 5-10 minutes of sleep, I get grouchy. And it takes me awhile to get back to sleep again. I am hoping that I am going to be able to kick this jet lag thing over the next two weeks. I am having lunch with a friend in Sacramento tomorrow and lunch with 3 more friends three days next week, as well as a dental appointment, a show in San Francisco (that I don't have to review!), and a show to review on Friday. Hopefully by then, my body will be back on track again, since it will have to give up its afternoon nap in order for me to get everything done.

Being a day sleeper awakened doesn't justify getting angry with everyone who is working hard to keep the house quiet, of course, but at least I now now how my father must have felt all those years.

Taking My Jet Lag on the Road

We've been home for several days now and yesterday I was actually awake most of the day, except for falling asleep during a Clint Eastwood movie and dreaming I was his daughter and needed to get a flashlight from him so I could cross a body of water and win $1 million. I couldn't even watch the end of the movie because the DVD stuck and I had to send it back to Netflix.

But anyway, I decided that I was sufficiently recovered that I could take the day to drive down to my mother's, have lunch, and tell her about our trip. It was a lovely day when I started out. The weather report earlier had shown a bit of rain traveling across the state, but nothing major.

So much for weather reporting. I drove into three HUMONGOUS squalls where the rain was so heavy that I could not see the road in front of me. There was lightning and thunder and one was so bad that I got off at the next offramp and just sat there and waited for it to pass (it took about 5-10 minutes for each squall to pass through).

When I got to my mother's house, she was surprised because they had only had sprinkles there. Guess it built in intensity as it moved east!

We had a very nice visit. I told her all about China, gave her the gifts I'd bought for her, modeled my new jacket (which she loved), and we had lunch.

After lunch, I showed her a slide show I'd put together for her. Only about 150 pictures out of the hundreds I took, but I knew that she would be interested in only the VERY highlights. She was impressed with the Terracotta Warriors and I'm sorry I didn't include more of them in the show.

By 2 p.m., I had begun to realize I was going to either have to leave to drive home or take a nap before I left. The problem with taking a nap was that by the time I woke up, I would be right smack in the middle of rush hour, which I want to avoid at all costs (though somehow "rush hour" doesn't seem nearly as bad as it did before we went to China!)

So by 2:30, I was in the car, had my audio book going and I was getting on the road. Midway across the "you can't turn around or get off here" highway 37, which connects Highway 101 with I-80 I realized that I desperately needed something to help me stay awake,

On that drive, I know where all the fast food joints are and I decided to stop at McDonald's in Vallejo, but I still needed to take a break before that, so pulled off at a marina where I saw this sign...

There's got to be a story behind that. How do you lose a boat? You notice there is no description whatsoever. Maybe finding lost boats is a common occurrence among boat people. I don't know.

That stop perked me up a bit and I was able to continue on to McDonald's to get my sure-fire picker-upper, an Iced Mocha. They asked if I wanted chocolate or caramel...well, "mocha" kinda means chocolate and coffee. I like the iced mocha, which almost always wakes me up because you get the caffeine and the sugar and that dollop of whipped cream on top.

Only this was the worst iced mocha ever. Though I had specified chocolate, they put an anemic drizzle of caramel on the top (and no chocolate IN the coffee, so it just tasted like unsweetened iced coffee--and weak coffee at that) and then instead of the whipped cream dome that they should use, they jammed down a flat lid on top of it, smashing what little whipped cream they had squirted on there. If I'd been macho, I'd have gone back and insisted they do it again, but I just meekly took what I had been given and drove on, though without the sugar (this is the only time I take sugar in my coffee), it didn't give me the jolt I was looking for.

So by the time I was about 20 minutes from home, I was really, really fighting sleep. I could barely focus in front of me. In fact, I came home on alternate roads instead of I-80. I knew I needed to stop for groceries, but I couldn't even think of that. I desperately needed to sleep before I did anything.

I practically fell through the front door, gave the dogs their treats and plopped into the recliner, where I slept for about an hour. Then I was OK and went out to the store.

When I came home, the TV was broadcasting news about the raging storm, with funnel clouds threatening to touch down here and there.

It's one thing to live in a tornado area, where homes have storm cellars; it's another to live in a place where all homes are built on cement slabs with no cellar whatsoever.

But the threatened cloud has passed away, finally -- taking the internet with it. My connection seems to be gone with the wind. I have no idea how long it's going to take to get it back.

Never Say Never

I am the person who is never bothered by jet lag.

Yeah. Right.

I always figured that because my sleep cycle is so screwy anyway my body just says "OK. Sure. Whatever" and picks up with whatever time zone it's in. When we arrived at Mike and Char's after 28 hours of being awake, it was 11 p.m., my normal sleep time, and I slept all night. Great! I was back on California time.

I had no problem all day the first day back, as I unpacked, did laundry, and started sorting through photos. So many photos! I went to sleep again around 11 p.m. but woke up a couple of times and at 3:30 this morning I was wide awake. Hmmmm.

But I have weird sleep patterns anyway, right?

So today I dedicated myself to starting to get photos posted on Flickr, which meant moving them to my computer, from the camera, sorting through them, tweaking some of them, deciding which were good enough to post to Flickr and then posting them. I got Helsinki and Estonia posted and then sorted through the pix of The Hermitage. It takes a long time for photos to upload, so I decided I was feeling a little sleepy. I'd just go relax while the pictures were uploading.

I don't remember what time that was, but about 2 p.m.

I woke up to the sound of Walt pouring dogfood into the dog bowls and the music for Wheel of Fortune. I had slept for...hours! I was supposed to go to the store for food at some point. I was supposed to do interviews for an article I need to get done right away, and I had slept the entire afternoon.

So much for jet lag theories!

Fortunately we had tamales in the freezer that I could cook for dinner.

After dinner I went back to organizing photos. I kept them very organized on the computer on the ship but I never MOVED things from disk to computer, I merely copied them, so I'd have a backup. But that means having photos in two places and needing to organize them in a third so I can upload to a fourth.

Sometimes I think that people without cameras must lead very happy lives.

In addition to all the photos, there are all the videos. I took lots on my digital camera, and some on my flip video. the ones from my digital camera need to be converted from .mov format to .avi format...and then I have to remember which are on the flip and which need to be edited together with the ones on the digital camera.

I'll tell you, folks, it's painful to sit on a woolsack stuffed with such thorns as these.

The videos I took were, many times, just snippets of moments I wanted to remember, so today's video of the Church in the Rock in Helsinki is very brief, but the church was lovely and I liked sitting there listening to the recorded music. (I embedded a shorter version of this into my journal entry the day I wrote it, so this is kind of a duplicate, for those who watched it then)

Slowly, slowly things are falling into place. It seems that we are only missing one thing, but I'm sorry about that. We bought a CD from the men who sang at a little Pavilion at the Catherine Palace and we can't find it anywhere. I do have a recording of what they sang, since I videotaped it (though you can't see them...I mostly videotaped it to have the sound). I may use that in a slide show about the Palace, since we don't have any other record of it.

But other than that, it seems that all the little trinkets we bought have arrived home in good shape and we didn't lose anything valuable that we brought with us.

I am taking up the reins of life again tomorrow, having lunch with my friend Kathy in Sacramento and a show to review the night after that (Spamalot, which I have been looking forward to seeing)

Cappuccino goes to the SPCA thrift store tomorrow to meet someone who will go and cut his manhood off, poor baby. If he was skittish before, I can only imagine what he'll be like afterwards. Getting him in the car is going to be a neat trick, since he just barely lets me touch him now. I think this is going to be a dog carrier day.

I am slowly shaking off the aura of cruise passenger and taking up the mantle of housewife again. I have had e-mails from some of our fellow passengers today and it's nice to make contact with them after the trip. I wonder if our paths will cross on some other voyage. Char is already talking about China.

....when I was doing "this day in my history" for today, I realized that one year ago I had "the trip bug," the illness that affected everyone in our group on the France/Italy trip. Today I have what apparently is being called "The Kirov Cough," which several people on the ship had at the end of the trip.

I wonder what you get when you visit China....