Inner Dialogues

Lately, my sleep cycle has been messed up. Last week I made the mistake of taking a half sedative two nights running, but that only made the third night (sans sleep aid) worse. I'm sure I'm not the first to wish that there were a tablet that could be taken for an instant eight hours of restorative shut-eye.

Maybe winter's to blame; I suppose I need something to blame. Used to be the booze that interfered with sleep. Now it's the weird schedule that can include very early mornings and late evenings (especially those days that start at school and end in jail. Jail meeting, that is. Haha!)

I sleep very poorly at "The House." Doesn't matter how tired I get when I'm there and how ready for bed I might be when I lock the doors at 11 PM and turn out the lights in the basement (where we have a lovely gym setup; note to self: start making use of that soon). For one thing, the radiator works overtime and the room gets very hot and dry. If I open the window even a crack, I'm freezing halfway through the night and always reluctant to get up to shut it. The upside to the open window is the starlings warming themselves on the chimneys across the street in the early morning; it's a nice sound to wake up to.

We're up to 28 residents in The House and it's hard to believe that the capacity is 35. We feel fairly crowded as it is. I suspect the owner might want to fill the place up but I don't think it's a good idea. Not everyone is keen to share a room, especially not with someone who snores, thrashes or sleepwalks. And some of these so-called "double" rooms are really singles, unless you believe a foot of space between beds is adequate.

I get complaints about these arrangements. Or else that a room is too cold. I'm already pretty tired of hearing that one. They are wise not to complain about the food. Which is OK -- edible enough, and sometimes even good -- but Cordon Bleu it ain't.

On a more positive note, a tiny part-time job has materialized. I applied on a whim last fall, at the start of the school year, in the event that the kitchen staff might ever need an extra person. Last Thursday one of them said another school in town is, in fact, looking to hire someone for about 10 hours a week. I will be making snacks, e.g. oatmeal cookies, muffins, etc.

(Tangent: I don't believe in "whims." I believe in intuition. Something told me that the school kitchen work could be a logical step forward/up from serving breakfasts in a volunteer capacity. And so it came to be: not immediately, but really, just at the right time.)

I seem to get fed up with everything partway through January. Not exactly longing for spring or summer, but just weary of the routine. Last year at this same time I wanted very badly to quit the breakfast gig, but I stuck it out and was pleased in the long run to have gone the distance. This year was the same; I've been working up to quitting ever since the end of the first week in January.

Part of the source of my discontent has always been that our school seems to get short shrift in the fruit department because we have fewer children eating breakfast at our school. But last week I was ready to blow when I saw we'd been given ONE ORANGE and TWO APPLES and ONE-THIRD of a pineapple to feed up to 30 kids. We generally get more, but it's erratic. So I wrote a grumpy note, although seriously not as grumpy as it could have been. I wrote "One orange? Think we could have more?" and left it at that.

Cheap bastards.

That is what I wanted to write. But of course, you can't. On the other hand, I've already told them verbally at least twice that they are tightwads. They have gaped at me, laughed nervously, and subsequently been a little more generous, if only for a short time.

See, a lot of people are getting salaries in this school-breakfast program. And at the end of last year they spent a fair bit of money throwing us some sort of thank-you event which was (I think) overboard. Money that could better have been spent BUYING MORE ORANGES. Or an EXTRA BUNCH OF GRAPES even when they're not (GASP!) on special.

Oh, blah blah blah.

Other than that, all is well... the Dalai Lama says it is important to measure your overall happiness by what you have, not what you don't have, and what I have is plenty. After all, I could be living full-time in a house with 28 other people, eating margarine on white bread (*shudder*) and drinking bad coffee.