Sunday, Boring Sunday

(What follows is the entry that I had started to write before I lost my Internet access yesterday.)

Friday night found me staying after work a bit for training about a new problem that we have to deal with.
I’m not complaining because, for one thing, it was a bit of overtime, and, for another, having more work to do at this point can’t help but be a good thing.
Still, this did mean getting home later than usual and getting to bed later than usual, which conspired with the general perversity of the universe to ensure that I got much less sleep than is necessary to ensure that I stay awake for twelve and a half hours of sitting around in a cold, dark room after having gotten up well before the sun.
There was a time in my life that I compare to having been a junkie with a $5,000 a day habit, in that it took massive amounts of my drug of choice just to keep me level. That is to say, I received no additional “boost” from my drug of choice.
My drug of choice in those days, apart from the alcohol and nicotine, obviously, was caffeine, delivered in the form of Mountain Dew.
I pretty much drank Mountain Dew from the moment I got up until right before I went to bed. When I wasn’t drinking beer, I was drinking Dew. Of course, when I was drinking vodka, odds are I was also drinking Dew.
The caffeine didn’t make me jittery. It didn’t keep me awake at night. It didn’t give me any extra energy.
Basically all it did was give me severe headaches if I went without it for too long.
Eventually, when the time came to give up the sauce, I also stopped doing the Dew, as I had managed to “detox” and power my way through the caffeine-deprivation headaches and resolved to never have another one.
Of course, given that the consequences of drinking something with caffeine aren’t likely to be quite as dire as those of drinking something with alcohol, I haven’t avoided caffeine as assiduously as I’ve avoided booze.
I just try to make sure I don’t go back to my former levels of consumption.
Of late I’ve taken to drinking a SoBe Energy every morning at work, receiving the actual benefit of being able to cut through the early morning cobwebs, and because I keep the consumption limited I haven’t run into the downside of using caffeine.
However, after three nights of restless sleep, on Saturday morning the SoBe was not enough to keep me going, and so when Brian came around and said he was heading to the store, I opted to go along and picked up a real energy drink, a Full Throttle.
Now that made me jittery.
Sadly, it didn’t do much to add to my wakefulness, though, and by the end of the day I was really dogging it, so I crashed pretty early last night and ended up taking a two and a half hour nap after being up for about an hour this morning.
I’d had a lousy night’s sleep on Wednesday and Thursday mostly because of the irritating weather. All day long on Wednesday there had been this nice, cool breeze blowing in, keeping the condo at a nice, comfortable temperature now that the humidity had dropped and the temperature has gone below the thousand degree mark.
Shortly after I went to bed, though, the breeze died and after a couple of hours I woke up to find my tongue plastered to the roof of my mouth and my pillow in desperate need of a wringing. I waded through my sweat over to the box fan and put it going in the window, at which point, the seal that was keeping the much cooler outside air from coming in broken, it actually got kind of cold, particularly given that I was sopping wet.
The boiling followed by the freezing made for a restless night, and the exact same thing happened on Thursday night.
And then, of course, there was my lousy night on Friday, ultimately leading to my caffeine experience.
In addition to the Full Throttle I made use of this flavored caffeine additive for water that Scott gave me after my jitters wore off, so I was due for a major crash that evening.
In any case, upon waking from my Sunday nap the loss of Internet access that occurred shortly after I started writing this entry led me to scrap it until I had access again.
Given the crappiness of my cable company, I knew that I would be unlikely to get Internet access again on Sunday, so I resigned myself to that fact and found other ways to pass the time.
There are a lot of things that I could have done to pass the time, but, as should surprise no one, I didn’t do any of those things.
Mostly I burned some recorded TV shows to DVD (I got the bright idea of recording Everyday Italian, err, every day, so that I can make DVDs that I can watch on Munin and cook along with Giada), and went through some old CDs and DVDs I’d burned in the past to see what was on them and to see if there were any that I could toss.
And, up until The Venture Bros. came on and caused me to choke on laughter for a half an hour, that was pretty much my Sunday.
Stay tuned for Monday.