Insomnia Sucks

I've had a problem with insomnia since puberty. There's nothing worse than lying in bed while everyone else in the house is asleep, dreaming sweet dreams.

Except over the last three years, I haven't had much of a problem. Part of it was the sheer physical exhaustion of packing up eighteen-years' worth of toys and memories in a twenty-five hundred square-foot house. Part of it was being to set my own schedule once DH and GK headed north with the first moving truck and stayed in Ohio.

(I've found I do best going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time every day helps.)

And even with all the drama since I arrived in Ohio almost eighteen months ago, I've gotten to sleep within an hour of going to bed.

But last night I tossed and turned until three-fifteen when I finally thought, Enough is enough. If I'm going to be wide awake, I'll go write so I don't wake DH.

So in the silence, I tiptoed to my office, fired up my laptop, and started writing.

I wrote until I heard noises in the parking lot. I wrote until I started having trouble concentrating. And at five-thirty a.m. I turned off the lights, started the backup on my laptop, and tiptoed back to bed.

Where I preceded to have weird-ass dreams about rednecks, abandoned puppies, and sick kittens that needed to go to the vet on Monday, but in my dream, it was Saturday night.

Or I did until eleven a.m. when the National Weather Service decided all the counties remotely bordering Lake Erie needed to test their tornado warning system. Even though our county religiously tests the damn things on the first of the month at ten a.m. every fucking month. (Sorry, but Hancock County's testing often coincides with holidays, which is why GK is ecstatic that Spring Break falls on the last week of March this year.)

The other problem this morning (well, this afternoon) is that I've been trying to quit drinking diet soda over the past two weeks. This isn't me trying to be a health nut. The artificial sweetners, as well as food preservatives and processing chemicals, have been doing some weird things to my body, and I've noticed a major difference when I stray from water and tea.

Unfortunately, I have also been consuming vast amounts of caffeine over the last three years. DH theorizes the caffeine works on me the same way uppers do on adults with ADHD. In theory, the drug should exacerbate the problem, but it relieves it. I don't know if he's right, but if he is, I'm in big trouble when it comes to sleeping.

DH has to take his mom to a doctor's appointment at the same time GK gets out of school. Otherwise, my lovely husband would pick up the kid for me. In my need to be alert and conscious, DH gave me a bottle out of his secret stash of Pepsi Max.

I'm nearly through my first glass as I type this, and I can already feel the difference in both measures.

All I do know is that I need to be coherent enough to pick up my son from school, and I need to get those dream kittens to the vet. I think one of them has pink eye.