I didn’t quite make it to bed tonight before the staff in Bahrain had come online. Them being seven hours ahead of us is hard to deal with. They work really long hours there. I ended up working until one thirty in the morning before being able to go in to bed and still I was checking the BlackBerry most of the night. Fortunately there was very little activity last night and it wasn’t too bad. I only had to get up once during the night after having gone to bed to take care of something.
Unlike most of my days at home there were really no dishes to do today. Dominica did them last night and cleaned the kitchen before I got home. My first domestic job of the day was to attempt to save our rose bush in the east window. It was doing great as it was getting sunlight recently but we let it go way too long without water and it is extremely unhappy with us at this point.
This morning was quite busy at work. The afternoon was not nearly so bad. But there was still a lot to do. Oreo had a great day as there was a ton of sunlight and he got the chance the just sleep and sleep. He didn’t wake up to go outside until after five in the afternoon! Dominica had already left the office and was heading home by the time he crawled out of bed and asked to be taken outside for his walk. He didn’t eat breakfast until minutes before she got home. What a lazy boy. He was very smiley all day. Daycare really wears him out as he gets older.
Dominica got home and was so tired that she didn’t even want to eat dinner. So Ryan and I went down to the wine and cheese party that TD Bancnorth (a tenant in our apartment building here at Eleven80) was having as a “getting to know our neighbours” event just for the residents. We went at a few minutes after six – half an hour after the event started and we were the first two people there. We felt really badly that no one bothered to show up at all. But the event was scheduled before most people at Eleven80 would get home from work and there were no reminders in the elevators for the event so everyone forgets. I had forgotten until Ryan reminded me.
Eventually two more people from Eleven80 showed up and one person who works at the Carlton Hotel (a homeless shelter nearby) who was wandering by and saw the harpist playing in the lobby. That was the total crowd all evening. We were having a good time visiting with people and talking but I was paged out between seven and seven thirty so I had to leave and run back home. When I left, Ryan and another resident that we were talking to (who actually graduated from Monroe Community College, same as me) both left with me leaving only one resident to stay until the event was done.
So I worked for a little bit and then had a snack with Dominica while we watched an episode of A Different World. We would have watched more but I had scheduled work tonight at eight thirty and I knew that we would likely be interrupted a bit so I just worked in the office until ten thirty. Dominica played MySims to get herself ready to fall asleep while I worked.
I tried going to bed at ten thirty so that I would have some sleep before getting hit with overnight calls and then having to do the early morning shift tomorrow (oh is that going to be rough) and no sooner did I lay down in bed – didn’t even get a chance to put on my CPAP – than I was paged out to support servers from another team. Someone thought that the overnight coverage happened hours early and thought that I was doing full coverage and so paged me out at a time when I would never have possibly been called normally. It is not going to be a good night. I can tell.
Actually it work out alright and I wasn’t paged out again until four thirty in the morning. That gave me enough time to get one or maybe even two actual sleep periods and, although I was completely exhausted, I was able to just get up and start my day. Since my shift needs to begin at six thirty anyway and since there is no one covering the overnight there is a very high risk of being called several times as we approach the start of the day. And this will keep other people from being paged out unnecessarily. We all have a long weekend coming up and I need to offload as much of it as possible as the weekend work impacts me very little. But most importantly I can’t keep letting Dominica get woken up. She had a terrible day yesterday because she was so tired and tried to go to bed very early last night. She doesn’t handle sleep interruptions like I do and the phone ringing throughout the night really disrupts her sleep patterns.
I eventually tracked down that one person from one team got confused and thought that I was covering the overnights this week. That person then told the call center that I was covering the overnights. The call center then spread it around and now, whether I like it or not, I am covering the overnight work, the early morning work and the late deployments on Friday. Thank goodness for coffee. And if you are reading this to see if I am available to do anything this evening – no, I am staying here. I am going to be very tired on Friday night. Sorry.