Cuddle With Me

This week has been sickly. Wait, no, I meant me. I've been sickly. Not actually sick, mind you, just feeling sick. Sick of being awake.

It started with Monday. I spent probably 10 hours that day working on a feature article for a client who wanted to submit something to the ever glamorous publication Soft Drinks International. I spent most of the weekend and Monday thinking and reading way more about plastic than I've ever wanted to, let's just say that. I filed the article with my client at 1:30 a.m. and went to bed.

Now, I don't know how old you are, whoever you are, but I am 26, and according to my genetic aging process, have long passed the age during which I can still pull an all-nighter -- even a quarter-of-a-nighter -- and still manage to fully function. No, I'm already an old geezer when it comes to staying up past my bedtime (9:30 p.m.) and I was thus 100% USELESS the next day. Although, in my defense, it's not like I got to sleep in or anything. I still woke up at 5:30 a.m. to be sure I was "in the office" at the usual time (7 a.m. Phoenix time) for my East Coast clients, plus I knew I was going to need to make myself available in the event the plastics article needed revisions.

Worked until roughly noon, until my workload came to a reasonable stopping point, then I set an alarm on my phone and shut my eyes on the couch for just a few minutes ...

One hour later, I woke up and got right back to work, but I swear, being that tired and trying to form cohesive sentences and type with accuracy is pretty darn near impossible. You end up typing things like "... but the real issue with PLA plastics isn't their durability, it's that their kittens are so cuddle with me ..." I know you know this to be true.

The next thing I knew, my boyfriend was arriving home from work already. I thought, "Good. I can stop working. We'll eat dinner. We'll watch a sitcom. We'll go to bed. And I'll get my usual eight hours of sleep and feel a whole lot better in the morning.

No.

"Well," my boyfriend said, "I have to go in to work early tomorrow morning, so we'd better just eat and then go to bed."
"What? How? How early?" I managed to stammer.
"I have to be there at 5," he said. "I'll set our alarm for 3:30."
Nooooooooooooo.

By the time all was said and done, what with defrosting the chicken and boiling the pasta and grilling said chicken to perfection and then eating said chicken with creamy alfredo sauce (Seriously, it was either that or just yogurt and beer. Note to self: buy frozen pizzas and/or TV dinners during next grocery trip), we didn't make it to bed any earlier than usual. In fact, we actually made it to bed later, so I only ended getting about six or six and a half hours of sleep. Funny how after you've had the same schedule for years those one or two hours can make such a huge difference right?

As a result, on Wednesday I was "in the office" by 5 a.m. I worked until 12:15 p.m., at which point I had to drive to Downtown Scottsdale, more specifically, to the fire department, to meet my editor and a photographer there for a story I've been assigned. Long story short, even though we had an appointment, there was a gross mis-communication prior to our arrival, and the trip turned out to be a bust. So I drove home, worked, then my boyfriend came home from work early since he'd started early, he played some Modern Warfare and then went to water polo practice. (Yes, a couple months ago it was rowing, now it's water polo -- I know, I can't keep up either.) I kept working.

Boyfriend came home at 10:00 from practice, there was some semblance of a dinner, then there was sleep. But not much, because going to bed at 11:00 and getting up at 5:30 means you're going to spend at least the first 30 minutes just thinking about the fact that you're going to bed at 11 and getting up at 5:30. It's the sick law of dreading what's coming.

So today -- exhausted. Today -- still behind on work for the week. Today -- had to interview a rambler over the phone. Today -- forgot to eat lunch. Today -- exhausted.

Today ... Tonight ... have to somehow clean up the house, because the in-laws arrive tomorrow morning.

Yes, that's right, in a fantastic twist of fate known as The Worst Timing Ever, they will be arriving from Oklahoma in the morning and I will somehow have to make sure they have decent living quarters and a refrigerator stocked with something more than just yogurt and beer.

Don't worry, I've pulled it off before.

And then after they leave on Sunday, so help me, I am going to sleep. For days.