I think I may be too far behind on my novel to catch up, even though I did some work on it during the slower periods at work over the weekend.
Time that could have been devoted to it today was eaten up by house-hunting (more on that in a bit), and now…well, I just don’t feel up to it.
As for the story itself, I found myself feeling extremely bad about some of the incredibly mean things I’ve been doing to the protagonist.
I’m really making her life suck.
And, if I proceed, it’s only going to get worse.
Ah well.
The weekend was long and exhausting.
Saturday night I went to bed slightly later than usual thanks to some changes I had to make to my computers (nothing major, but something that I wanted to take care of, and which would take too long to explain here).
At some point after I’d fallen asleep, which had taken slightly longer than usual, I heard an odd, yet familiar, noise that woke me up. I looked at the clock and saw that it was a bit after 9:30.
This left me confused, as I was thinking 9:30 am, so I thought, “Shouldn’t I have been at work three and a half hours ago?” Then I realized that the odd noise was my cell phone ringing, so I thought, “Damn, why did they wait so long to call me to tell me I’m late?”
It was at that point that I noticed that it was dark out, and so it was probably 9:30 pm, and that I’d only been sleeping for about an hour.
The call was from my friend Kevin, who thought that it was much more reasonable to call me at 9:30 in the evening as opposed to 1:30 in the morning.
In that regard he was correct, but he was mistaken in thinking that he wouldn’t be waking me.
Now, perhaps it is unreasonable for me to be sleeping that early, even if I do have to get up, at the very latest, at 5 am (though I usually get up at 4:15 in order to get in my pre-work workout).
However, that’s been my sleep pattern for almost three years now. Barring the occasional call from Kevin, I honestly have no real reason to stay up most nights, so I figure I might as well get as much sleep as possible.
After all, spending twelve and a half hours sitting in a cold, dark room staring at a computer screen and waiting for something to happen is hard enough when you’re well-rested, so it’s even worse when you’re not.
And this time of year, when it’s dark when you arrive, dark when you leave, and you spend the whole day in a sunless room, it becomes especially exhausting.
That makes getting as much sleep as possible a necessity.
So my apologies, Kevin. I’d be perfectly happy to talk with you one of these days, but on weekends sleep is my number one priority.
After I blew Kevin off (sorry once again), it took me a little while to get back to sleep, so when I woke up a bit after four, I looked at the clock and thought about how my alarm would be going off shortly, said, “Screw that,” and reset the alarm for five.
This morning found me waking up at 6:25 am for some reason. I felt tired in sort of an odd way, something similar to the grogginess that you sometimes feel if you’ve slept too long. Given that I was having more difficulty getting back to sleep than I normally would under similar circumstances, and because it didn’t seem to be getting any brighter outside, I began to wonder if somehow I’d managed to sleep all day and into the evening.
After a while I decided that was unlikely and redoubled my efforts to go back to sleep.
I woke up again about an hour later and was pleased to see that it was getting light out, then drifted back to sleep for another hour.
Eventually I got up and after a typical morning headed out to meet with my realtor.
He had me look through some listings to find places I wanted to look at, and then we headed out.
The list of places that fell anywhere within the acceptable price range was pretty small.
Out of all of them, I found one place that really stood out, a nice little two-bedroom condo that had this cool little sun room and a nice kitchen.
It was probably much bigger than it looked, but the owner, who wasn’t present, had WAY too much furniture crammed into the place.
We looked at another condo that had a similar layout, minus the sun room and with a smaller kitchen, but which had this amazingly high vaulted ceiling with a skylight which made it seem really, really big.
Overall, though, I really liked the kitchen in the other place, as well as the sun room, and of all the places that we saw, my realtor felt that was the best in terms of resale value, and that the nice touches like the larger kitchen and the sun room made up for the lack of vaulted ceilings. Also, it was in a better neighborhood, apparently.
It was pricey, though: $243,000.
That places it right at the very limit of what I could even think about buying.
Overall, it was a very sobering experience, and more than a little disheartening.
Still, the fact remains that I’m tired of just pissing money away on rent, so I definitely have to keep looking.
Once I got home I called my mom (who is now in Tucson for the winter), and told her about my day.
After that, because I was tired, kind of depressed, and because it was cold, rainy, and just generally miserable outside, I decided to take a nap, even though it was pretty late in the day.
So it was dark when I woke up, which is always kind of disorienting.
And that brings us here.
I suppose that there is enough time left in the day that I could do some work on the novel.
So I guess it’s back to making my protagonist’s life miserable…
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