I have been thoroughly zonked all day. I didn't sleep well, or possibly at all, on Sunday night, I think I might have dozed for a couple of hours, so I was hoping for a good sleep on Monday night. And things started out looking so good: went to bed about 2AM (early for me), fell asleep almost immediately.

And then the thunderstorm arrived, and I had the window open. A local newspaper report describes the thunder as sounding like a bomb going off.

I don't know what time it arrived over Chatham, I didn't wake up past the "Oh god, that's noisy, and it's light out there, leave me alone!" stage until about 10AM, but it seemed to go on for ages. I'm guessing at least couple of hours, but possibly from 4AM onwards. (A friend who volunteers at an animal rescue cetre says the rain was so heavy some of their cages and aviaries flooded and they had to rescue animals that were already at the rescue centre).

I finally woke up properly at 11AM, but that only lasted about an hour, I spent the whole afternoon dozing off into a microsleep about once every 10 minutes.

Here's hoping for a slightly quieter and less flashy night.

I was due an Asda delivery between three and four PM today, and the timing's always a bit iffy (30 minutes early to an hour late), so 1pm-ish I was debating what to do for the afternoon that I could interrupt at need. I decided to start with a soak in a hot bath as I could finish that well before the delivery was due. 2PM-ish I'm in the tub when the phone rings. I ignored the first call, but then it rang again, so it's hop out of the tub, grab a towel and grab the phone time.

"Hi, it's your Asda driver, I'm just around the corner, if you're in can I delivery early?"

On the one hand, aargh, on the other it gets it done with. So I start throwing clothes on.

And when he said "just around the corner," he apparently meant it, he had the first crates stacked outside the door before I managed to get socks on.

So I now have a reasonable variety of food in the house again, even if I still need to find the energy to shelve it (and I've restocked the spirits stash, which was seriously bare).

Sleeping was again a disaster, post 8AM into the arms of Morpheus for the second day running (so I'm working on three hours sleep). But at least I remembered a fragment of today's dream, which seemed to involve me and an accurately portrayed friend (including his rather worrying view of traffic regs as strictly optional) visiting a mashup of several different female friends who was in rehab after a spinal injury and not taking it at all seriously. I'd presume the SCI side came from my symptoms flaring up last week (thankfully they've mostly settled down again), but while being conscious that I'm dreaming is nice, I'd really quite like to get a full night's sleep sometime this week, please?

Oh, and today was the first time I've noticed significant evidence of frost lingering on the roofs even at nearly midday. Clearly it's getting colder.
 

Last night, 12:30-ish:  

Yawn, I could really do with an early night.

Oh, I completely forgot that story idea I had last night (ie Wednesday), I'll just open up a Word file and note down the title, that'll be enough to remind me.

3745 word (and five hours) later ....

I was half-awake when I heard my sister video-calling, so stumbled through to answer it, only to get a:

"David, are you just waking up! It's 2PM!"

(plus raucous laughter from her husband).

It was only after I'd answered her question and she'd rung off, that I started wondering "If I'm only just waking up, why are my breakfast things on the table?"

I eventually figured it out, but it's a measure of how tired I was that it took me about half an hour to put it together.

I didn't get to sleep at all last night, because I had that occasional opioid painkiller itching all over side-effect.

So about 8AM I gave up on any hope of sleeping, pottered about for a couple of hours, then ran a bath, had my breakfast while that was filling, got out of it just gone 11AM, and promptly fell asleep while getting dried while sitting on my bed.

And I had absolutely no recall of any of this when I woke up at 2PM. If it wasn't for the breakfast things I might still be oblivious to the fact I'd only managed 3 hours of sleep, and spent the entire night awake.
 

It started off with about half an hour's sleep on the Friday night, half an hour on the Saturday night, and at most 4 hours on the Sunday. I'm used to my sleep patterns being a mess, but that's the first time they've ever actually scared me - particularly as I couldn't identify any particular reason behind the shift. Thankfully they settled down a bit after that (though not helped by being woken three times by the same spam call on the Monday, the earliest of which may have been before 8AM, the second was definitely before 9AM), but I basically spent the entire week half-asleep while I tried to catch up. But I slept 12 hours on Saturday night, and 7 hours last night, so hopefully things are back to merely abnormal. This recent Guardian article I stumbled across mid-week seems to fit me almost to a tee:

Extreme night owls: ‘I can’t tell anyone what time I go to bed’ 

And just to make the week complete, I then developed an upset stomach. I can't tell if it was a bug, or the normal end of opioid patch, opioid levels are fluctuating, delayed gastric transit has some catching-up to do thing I get once a week, as the symptoms were identical, but that normally lasts no more than half a day, whereas this was more like five. Ick!

Latest example of unthinking ableist idiocy to come my way: John Lewis (non-food UK shops re-opened from lockdown today, John Lewis are a high-end department store chain) have installed hand-sanitizer dispensers in the entrance to all their stores, they're foot-operated. Apparently wheelchair users are magically immune from spreading coronavirus. A friend posted a pic from their local food store last week of a hand-sanitizer unit that looked like a big steel bin, preventing wheelchair users getting close, and I thought that was going to be difficult to beat, but a bit of googling showed up that Global Protection Supplies are marketing a whole range of them, all foot-operated. *Headdesk*

Recent Reading

Mutineer's Moon,
The Armageddon Inheritance,
Heirs of Empire, David Weber

Reread. This is really a duology and a linked singleton, rather than a true trilogy. It's Weber, so you pretty much know it's going to be MilSF. Dealing with the duology first, NASA astronaut Lt Cmdr Colin MacIntyre is flying a mission over the Moon to try out a new penetrating densitometer, when he finds himself shanghai'd by the ancient spaceship Dahak, whose camouflage he was about to penetrate. It isn't that his course was unfortunate enough to take him over Dahak, so much as inevitable, because Dahak is the Moon. Aboard Dahak, Colin rapidly learns that everything he thought he knew about history is wrong. Humanity isn't native to Terra, the whole Terran ecosphere was seeded by a long vanished alien empire, as were many other planets, and there have been multiple previous 'Human' empires, which keep getting swatted by galaxy roving xenophobes the Achultaani (who are dead-ringers for the Traveller RPG's K'kree, though without the claustrophobia, and with the xenophobia turned up to 11). Dahak was meant to be a forward picket against the Achultaani for the Fourth Imperium, but its crew mutinied and Dahak has been sitting overhead for 50,000 years, caught in the Catch-22 of its captain's last orders. It can't move until the mutiny is resolved by loyal crew, but it prevented the mutiny's success by rendering its internal spaces uninhabitable, forcing both the mutineers and the loyal crew to evacuate down to the surface, and crippling itself in the process. By the time Dahak had repaired itself, there was no-one left in the loyal crew it could contact - because the mutineers had hunted down any surviving officers, or evidence of technology - so it has had to sit passively overhead* while the crew and their descendants spread over the planet, becoming homo sapiens, and while the mutineers manipulated them from their hidden base in Antarctica. But now Dahak has Colin aboard, and fleet regs, designed for a species with a four century lifespan and two century deployments, say that any descendant of a crewman becomes a crewman, so what are your orders, Senior Fleet Captain MacIntyre?

* Well, passively bar evolving to self-awareness through being left on for 500 centuries.

So there's a mutiny to be put down, and only one man to do it, but on landing back on Earth Colin rapidly discovers there are actually two factions of mutineers. There's the dominant faction, who are keeping themselves spry at 50,000 by brain transplants into unwilling hosts, and the slightly decrepit resistance, who are horrified at what they got talked into, and have spent millenia fighting to limit the predation of the bad guys. And there is much derring-do and the good guys emerge triumphant. But then there's the Achultaani search and destroy mission that's due, and why isn't the Fourth Imperium answering its email?

Heirs of Empire picks up a couple of decades later. Emperor Colin I is busy rebuilding the Imperium, and he's got a couple of good-looking* kids to carry on the line, but he never found all of the mutineer's Quislings in Terran government, and Mr Big has now reached a position of power where he can put his plan to become emperor into operation. And the kids are going to have to be the first thing to go. And if he can pick off the kids of half of Colin's inner circle at the same time, then that's just a bonus. But Dahak's protective meddling means the plan doesn't go quite to plan, and the kids - actually late teenagers on their Midshipmen's cruise - end up marooned on a regressed Fourth Imperium planet, where a fanatical priesthood maintains an armed orbital quarantine that hasn't been necessary for millennia, while keeping the rest of the planet in an enforced stasis that's ended up at roughly 16th/17thC levels of technology, with the pike block as the supreme battlefield weapon. When their probing around trying to figure out how society works accidentally starts a jihad by the church against one region of the planet, the only thing for a pair of MacIntyres to do is to take charge and bring down the Ancien Regime.

* Well, bar the MacIntyre nose.

This last book is very clearly the prototype for Weber's ten-book Safehold series, with a corrupt, and deliberately designed, church that must be brought down in order to allow technology to flourish, and where it's down to a limited number of survivors from a technological past to lead the good guys to victory. It's also very clearly the prototype for his 4 book Empire of Man series with John Ringo, where the ship-wrecked Imperial Heir must fight his way across an alien planet to reach his one hope of getting home. And he's recycled the Imperial bodyguard unit making a doomed defence of their charge into the Honor Harrington series at least once, if not twice. Now that's efficient writing! Not necessarily innovative writing, but definitely efficient.

Currently reading: The Goblin Mirror, C J Cherryh, and I may reread the rest of her Slavic fantasy as well, but I'll be taking a break between them in order to read Yoon's Phoenix Ascendant, which I now have a gorgeous looking copy of.

Over the weekend my body decided to flip from awake until dawn, sleep past noon, to crash out mid evening, wake up hours pre-dawn. This isn't too unusual, it does it once or twice a year, but it takes a day or two getting used to.

But by Tuesday morning I'd sort of normalized around that, and woke up at 3:30 with more energy than usual. So I spent a couple of hours reading, and by six the sun was shining, there wasn't a cloud in the sky and I was thinking "really good day to get caught up on the housework". Then I stood up, and realised I still had Monday evening's backache - which isn't bad, cf being awake for several hours without realising, but it really doesn't like me being up and on my feet, or vertical above the waist in general. By my normal standards even that isn't too drastic, but it's just enough to tip me over into 'thanks, I think I'll not do that then". Four days later, backache's still here and we've had three gorgeous days (Wednesday was a washout) when I should have been tidying the house, catching up on washing, whatever, and even more rarely had the energy to do it, but couldn't. This is surprisingly frustrating given I'm normally glad of any excuse to avoid housework.

I've gotten some useful work done on one of my hobby projects that I can do flat on my back, but other than that it's been a week of playing computer games with the desk chair tipped right back. I actually missed the launch day for Extinction - the new Ark DLC, but that actually serendipitous as the hordes waiting for it to release were kept waiting until the wee small hours of the morning - not only was the release delayed, but so many people were trying to download Steam apparently crashed under the strain. So next day I was able to spend the  afternoon watching various of Ark's more prominent players livestreaming their first experiences on the map and then try it myself in the evening. It's spectacular - think Walking With Dinosaurs meets The World With Out Us or Life After Man, but I'm actually not that excited about it as yet. I'll undoubtedly keep playing, but I'm much more excited about having relocated my base on Ark Ragnarok the day before. I've actually now got that where I mean to put it in the first place - I got confused and thought it was right next door to the place I spawned in, rather than on the other side of the map. I actually got myself eaten when trying to relocate, so cheated and made myself temporarily invincible until I'd gotten myself to where I wanted and gotten a base established. The game does actually have a Creative Mode built into single player that lets you do this, but I generally just use admin mode cheats. I think the difference is a lot of Ark can be quite claustrophobic - forests, jungles, caves, and now city streets, but I like the open country, and the place I've relocated myself to is basically moorland, in fact it's actually called the Highlands. Lots of exploring to be done next time I go back in.

Which would have been yesterday, but I'd promised myself I'd buy Jurassic World - Evolution the next time it was on offer, and yesterday it was on offer (I actually bought Extinction back in April, when i bought the Ark Season Pass, so that's not actually two computer games bought in a week, even if it is two acquired in two days). I spent a couple of hours playing last night and it's kind of fun - you're the manager of the new Jurassic World theme park, and get to build the park to your own specifications, while being nagged by the heads of science, entertainment, and (in)security, and advised by a sleazy PR guy, while Jeff Goldblum sits in the background running a constant "This is a bad idea, Life will fine a way" schtick. I'm not certain quite how many behaviours they have programmed into the dinosaurs, but it looks spectacular. In fact the dinosaurs look more realistic than the people and compare very favourably with what we've seen from the Walking With Dinosaurs etc show. They're quite a bit better than in Ark, which went more for sheer numbers of species than depth of modelling and animation. I haven't really done more than scratched the surface, but I think I'm going to enjoy it.

And the other thing I discovered this week is that David Weber has finally released the new Honor Harrington novel, a mere 5 years after the last in the series. I've read the Kindle sample, but I'm resisting buying it as it will probably devour a couple of days (Amazon say 900 pages, though I'm betting a couple of hundred of that is dramatis personae, which long since reached ridiculous lengths).

So the week's basically been goofing off, here's hoping next week is slightly more productive.

So I spent all last week trying to drag my sleep pattern back to normal, without much success - I did sleep normal hours Wednesday or Thursday, but then was massively awake all the following day and well past midnight. 

Saturday I tried to stay up to watch some of the Olympics, but fell asleep on the couch at11PM, then woke up at 3AM feeling completely awake - so I watched the coverage through until I fell asleep at 11AM and slept until 4PM.

So I was kind of hoping for a relatively early night,  but also wanted to catch the women's slopestyle, which started at 1AM - okay I'll watch that and go to bed. It promptly gets shunted back an hour, and then another 15 minutes,  when what they should have done is postponed the entire event until later in the week. Of 50 runs, only 13 didn't involve a fall, and most of those had some kind of incident. The winds were so strong riders were being stopped dead in the air, or blown 10m beyond their anticipated landing. So I ended up going to bed at 5:30AM, while deeply annoyed. Didn't get to sleep 'til 9-ish, slept til 4PM.

Aaaargh!!!
 

If I seem a bit quiet, it's a lack of spoons. I'm mostly keeping up with posts, but I've been seriously lacking in cope for the last week.

I'm not sure quite what's going on, and sleeping has been even more to pot than usual, but the average might be as high as 9 hours sleep/day* and I'm still struggling to be really awake for hours after that. There's a little evidence I might have a sinus bug, but the normal symptoms of that are almost totally absent, so the lack of energy for degree of bug seems unreasonable.

Friday I perked up enough to spend most of the day prodding twitter, but that might have been the extra annoyance of our Chancellor (number three in the government) being unspeakably ableist in parliament (he blamed falling UK productivity on disabled workers). I've needed to make a phonecall all week - nothing mind-boggling, just arranging passenger assistance for Thursday's train trip North, but didn't feel competent to do it until Saturday.

The notion of actually doing any writing is rather ha ha, yeah, right at the moment. I'm still hoping to finish the reworking of Graveyard Shift by the end of the year, but that's looking decidedly iffy if this fatigue doesn't clear up.

*Note per day, not per night - like I said, all to pot.

Yesterday I was fairly desperate to change the hours I'm awake, which had drifted to 2PM - til 6AM (this happens semi-regularly, my body doesn't seem to work on a 24 hour cycle, never mind the regular spontaneous crashes from overdoing stuff). So I'd stayed awake for 36 hours and at 2AM I was in bed, reading (Mishell Baker's 'Borderline') in the hope of drifting off to sleep, when the intersection of the book, me, and my writing sparked a thought in character voice: "I don't so much have brain-weasels as brain-wolverines."

I thought about it, sighed, got up and went downstairs to jot it down before I could forget it.1250 words later I'm not certain whether to call it a vignette, or a short story, but there's a twist in my protagonist's back story that potentially explains a lot.

And shifting my waking hours? I woke up at 3:30PM, {le sigh}

Beyond my part in the Spartacus Network response to the Work and Health Green Paper, I wanted to do a personal response as I take a slightly different view of the Disability Employment Gap that Work and Health is supposed to challenge and think it's much more to do with employer/recruiter disability discrimination and tacit government acceptance of the same/reluctance to display employers in a bad light.

I'd set today aside to do that, as submissions have to be in before 11:45PM (and dyspraxic, so bad with deadlines and planning), so of course today was the day I crashed and burned and slept all day because of cumulative fatigue.

The consultation had 46 questions, I managed to answer about 30 of them between waking up and remembering and 11:30PM rolling around which was when I pressed submit (just in time, it wasn't exactly quick to respond).

Which means I couldn't thoroughly respond to Work and Health because it was too much work for my health....

*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*