I can't remember what time I fell asleep this morning. It's all a blur. Maybe it was 8am, maybe it was 9am. I made a serious attempt at sleep at 5am, and after 15 minutes I almost rolled down into the Valley Of Dreams, but something disturbed me. Maybe it was the washing machine finishing its cycle.
Whatever it was, I couldn't switch off after that for another 3-4 hours. As a result I arrived at work - horror - 10 minutes late. The director of my school takes this sort of thing very personally. Like you have scratched his car, or dropped his baby. I accept responsibility, I accept I made a mistake. But 99% of the meetings we do have are to say, "No messages." Or we might get a message to "Turn the lights out when you leave the classroom at the end of the day." I am holding thumbs that they will not hold 10 minutes against me. I have been rapped on the knuckles before, so if I get into trouble it's partly my own damn fault. Slap slap.
So what am I doing until 8am in the morning? Well, basically my day is done after gym (around midnight) and so at about 1am I can start to do what I want to do. Lately that's blogging. If I do 7-8 posts, that can take anywhere from 2.5 to 5 hours right there. That may sound like I lot, but I am fairly meticulous in my research, and when I have something in mind to say, I like to say it pretty much 100% in line with the image, the style I have in my mind. That's not always an easy thing to satisfy.
Blogger and Hello (Hello loads the image HTML onto Blogger) can also add to the Time Costs. Hello sometimes bugs out in the middle of loading a picture. Sometimes you have to wait a good half hour just for it to get ready to publish one picture. You can imagine how that slows everything down.
Blogger also sometimes goes on the blink. More often though, I find a lot of errors and go back and forth, editing and publishing and polishing, and some posts get touched up and rewritten up to six or seven times. More if it's a really massive post.
Last night I posted about 7 pictures, and some of the text was really hard to source. The Jerry MacGuire quotes were not as easy to find or wade through as one might imagine. The Mission Statement also spun me off on my own little lark. I wrote an Ironman Mission, but I also wrote one for myself, a fully fleshed out one (I seem to have lost the one I wrote when I first read 7 Habits, which is a pity), and I wrote another smaller one which was my version of:
My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.
I tried to come up with a personal, powerful answer that fits my character. It's an interesting experiment. Everyone should try it.
So I also explore some of the issues I explore in my blog. At the moment there is so much stuff I'm interested in. Some of it is not very deep. Like ogling celebrities like Julianne, or finding rivetting accounts of abductions by aliens or something related to that. Other stuff is deep. Like going onto Franklin Covey's website, or going from the New York Times and following the various links there.
For example last night I read this quote on the New York Times website:
"E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited. It has companies tearing their hair out."
R. CRAIG HOGAN, a former professor who heads an online school for business writing.
Then followed the link to the article.
Then I read an article on using blogger.
http://www.blogger.com/knowledge/2004/12/learning-blogger.pyra
And from there I ended up at a great website called www.lynda.com. On her website were a few amazing free educational movies on how to use certain types of software, and I probably watched a few lessons on Quicktime. Not that I was very quick.
I spent a fair bit of time here:
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=113
I also played Counterstrike. Perhaps for 30 minutes. My connection was terrible, and in most platforms my ping was so high I just got kicked out. So I didn't do that for long.
I just get really lost in this maelstrom of crazy and delightful information, it's dazzling, and sleep just seems such a dull, dreary killjoy, such a waste. But even once I do kill the power to my computer, the buzz in my brain takes quite a long time to settle down. I couldn't sleep at 5am so I got up again and did washing, packed clothes away and ate nut bars. This nocturnal behaviour needs to be controlled though, because when I finally rise, it's getting pretty hard to shine.
Corneli gave me a call at 13:10, I asked her to in an email - probably the second last thing I did before I fell asleep. But even though I heard it ring, I was so gone that I didn't quite make it to the surface of awakeness. When I did wake up at 13:38 I quickly pulled on some clothes and ran out the door. Not a nice way to start the day, but the day raced by, probably because I was only fully present, fully awake about 50% of the time today.
Anyway, integrity is one of the values I hold in highest esteem, and being late doesn't reflect integrity. I feel bad making an obvious blunder like this. All I can do is insure that I'm on track from now on.
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