August 22, 2014

I'm not surprised in the least that I slept horribly last night. I started out sleeping on my air mattress on one side of the bed because there were outlets over there for my alarm clock. I can't remember all the reasons I ended up moving but I think it was primarily due to being too far away from the ceiling fan so it was getting kind of hot. It was also too quiet. I liked when the air conditioner kicked on every now and then because it was nice and loud but it didn't stay on for very long. When I moved, sometime after midnight, it was to the other side of the bed, under the ceiling fan, and also brought my laptop into the room so I could play some music and add a bit of noise to the silence.

We'll say that helped but I still had trouble falling to sleep. It didn't help that the dog is apparently a light sleeper because she would randomly, halfheartedly bark at stuff and shake her collar a lot. At some point I remembered my friend's mom saying she took the dog's collar off at night because she jingled it a lot. Taking the collar off helped a lot and I did eventually fall asleep. Kind of. I estimate that I didn't sleep more than three or four hours last night. It sucked.

It especially sucked at six o'clock in the morning when my alarm went off. Somehow I managed to get up to turn it off and then got dressed to go for an early morning walk. It was already over eighty degrees outside even though the sun wasn't quite up yet. We went for about a mile walk and it was way nicer than last night. Not nearly as hot and not nearly as long. It was also a decent way to wake up a little bit. I don't think I would have survived the day on so little sleep if I hadn't gone for the walk.

At work, things were done. I can't really remember what was going on at the beginning of my day. I know I did something but it is escaping me. I know I made an icon for the new Odyssey link. It's pretty sweet. I messed around with putting it on one of the computers in the lab but I didn't want to commit to putting it on all of the computers in case the links disappear over the weekend. I remember desktop links disappearing last year or the year before when I added them and I can't remember what the solution ended up being. I know my shortcuts page that I made in Word ended up being a solution but I can't remember if I ever came up with one for actual internet shortcuts. I need to mine through my old journal entries and see what I had to say about it. Maybe sometime this weekend.

I remembered yesterday or the day before that one of the kindergarten teachers asked me if I wanted to cut out some paper squares for him awhile ago so I went down and got the paper today and started that job. I worked on that off and on throughout the day and nearly finished. I was tempted to stay longer to finish it up but I already stay an extra hour and a half this week and I don't want to get in trouble for staying on the clock too long.

This afternoon my mom came into the lab looking a bit frazzled. It turns out that in her hurry this morning, because she was running late, she left her keys in the ignition and the car running when she got out. This was at eight o'clock and no one noticed it until one o'clock this afternoon when they parked behind her. I normally park behind her but I was also running a little late so I was a few cars behind. While walking by her car I was on the other side of the street and a school bus was passing between me and the car, so I didn't notice it being on. It also runs really quietly so that didn't help.

She actually had work to do so I offered to go home and get her spare set of keys because the class in the lab was all set and their teacher was in the lab so I didn't have anything to do. I peaked in the door window to see what the gas situation was like but couldn't see the indicator. It ended up being pretty close to a line and I assumed it was the empty line. So I raced home, driving the speed limit because that's what I do, grabbed two spare keys just in case, and drove back to the school.

When I hit the unlock button on the spare key I didn't hear anything but when I checked the door it was unlocked. I leaned in and saw that she actually had just over half a tank of gas left. Not bad considering it had been idling for so long. I turned it off, shut the door and locked it. After not hearing a sound with the spare key it kind of makes me wonder if the door was actually locked in the first place. I never thought to try the handle before I left because when my mom came in to tell me about it she said she had locked the keys in the car. But maybe the car has a thing that prevents it from locking if the keys are in the ignition and the car is on and in Park. At some point my curiosity wants to find out if that is the case. It would have saved me a lot of time if I didn't actually have to drive home.

After school I went home to eat a snack before going over to see the dog. I decided to go for a walk before feeding her dinner and then going home to take a shower and eat dinner myself. That worked out pretty well and the weather was slightly more bearable than last night. My friend's mom had mentioned a trail going around the cemetery and leading to the zoo and I had wanted to take that yesterday but wasn't exactly sure where it started. The dog solved that problem for me tonight because she walked right to it, like she read my mind. It was a little freaky. It was a cool little trail, a bit overgrown at times, and the railroad tie steps were too big and left a lot to be desired in terms of consistency, but I liked the walk. I had kind of wanted to take the trail back last night when our walk had lead to the zoo but there is no way I would have been able to find it coming from the other way, and the stairs would have been dangerous in the near-dark.

I was briefly tempted to keep going from the zoo, taking the same path we did last night to get back to the house but I was feeling alright and didn't want to push my luck, adding another mile to the walk. So we turned around and took the trail back. At least according to my phone the walk ended up being just over a mile long, and it was bumped up to a mile and a half later on in the night when we took a walk around the block.

After feeding the dog dinner and water all of the flowers I went home to take a shower and eat dinner. Then I came back to the house. My plan was to spend the next couple of hours reading one of my textbooks. I sat down in a comfortable chair, put my feet up, and read everything up to the first chapter before my eyelids got a little too heavy. I was listening to classical music on NPR and that combined with my reclined position and my lack of sleep last night turned out to be a lethal combination. It was a nice nap, though. And I'm still tired, so I'm going to bed as soon as I finish this. Hopefully tired enough to actually fall asleep. I would like nothing more than to sleep in but I think the plan is to wake up at six o'clock again so I can go for a walk before the temperature starts suck too bad. It's also nice when no one else is really out and about.

I'm not sure what the plan is for tomorrow. Other than reading a textbook. I really want to get at least one chapter read, preferably two, which isn't much to ask for considering they are two fairly short chapters. Other than that, who knows. Maybe watch YouTube or play some video games. Or something else entirely.