The Night Shift
24 April 2020
And so it has come to this: getting up in the night to get some work done. As is the case with many of you, I'm sure, the insomnia has got me bad this time. After weeks of fighting it, I've decided to use it instead to solve the problem of not being able to work much during the day with himself working from home. So up I drag myself to fill a hot water bottle and ready the blankets, for it is still grim up North in late April (well, sunny but Baltic), and fire up my largely neglected workstation in the front room.
Beginning to write this post on Monday 20 April, his children have been with us for the two weeks of Easter break, which during pandemic lockdown simply means a break from homeschooling. I got more done during that time than I anticipated, mostly because they've been very creative with fixing up some unsightly minor issues in the driveway and the back garden. We now have some inventive mosaics using the old bathroom and kitchen tiles, the leftovers from the new tiles, broken crockery over the last three years, and fragments of Victorian pottery left lying loose after being unearthed by bottle-diggers on nearby moorland. I feel there's something to be said about the mosaics as archives of broken pasts and waste, but that's as far as I've thought it through.
So here I am at just after 4am on Monday morning, scribbling something out while it's quiet before the ructions of homeschooling, video calls, hammering out emails and talking at me no matter what room I'm hiding in begin again. As I've said in an earlier post, I'm fully aware of my privilege in having a comfortable, safe home, but that doesn't magically fix the problems that arise when an introvert has their quiet workspace suddenly taken over by loud extroverts, never mind the heightened anxiety of maintaining any semblance of concentration or normality in a global crisis.
Anyway, I shall off to try to do some podcast editing while I remain conscious.
I ended up having an awful day on Monday with fatigue and a general feeling of unwellness. I crashed and had to rest all day. Still feeling tired but a bit stronger on Tuesday, I'm jotting a few things down while I prepare myself to try another free online course. The one I've just completed was a Future Learn course on tackling the Covid-19 outbreak, now being updated to run again in May. Know your enemy, right? It's really informative, but much of it quickly became out of date, and many of the measures it explains have frustratingly not been adopted by the UK government.
Looking towards employability (because at 35 with the qualifications and experience I've got I'm still struggling to get paid work) and what I can do to improve marketing the Audiovisual Cultures podcast, I've signed up to a course on Udemy to learn basic HTML. There was a time half my life ago when I could write basic web code, which I did for A-Level ICT. It may come of nothing, but at least being able to read and understand code will be a useful skill, especially as I use Linux Mint on my main computer. Well, here goes.
If you enjoy my posts, please consider donating to liberapay.com/peablair. Thank you!
And so it has come to this: getting up in the night to get some work done. As is the case with many of you, I'm sure, the insomnia has got me bad this time. After weeks of fighting it, I've decided to use it instead to solve the problem of not being able to work much during the day with himself working from home. So up I drag myself to fill a hot water bottle and ready the blankets, for it is still grim up North in late April (well, sunny but Baltic), and fire up my largely neglected workstation in the front room.
Beginning to write this post on Monday 20 April, his children have been with us for the two weeks of Easter break, which during pandemic lockdown simply means a break from homeschooling. I got more done during that time than I anticipated, mostly because they've been very creative with fixing up some unsightly minor issues in the driveway and the back garden. We now have some inventive mosaics using the old bathroom and kitchen tiles, the leftovers from the new tiles, broken crockery over the last three years, and fragments of Victorian pottery left lying loose after being unearthed by bottle-diggers on nearby moorland. I feel there's something to be said about the mosaics as archives of broken pasts and waste, but that's as far as I've thought it through.
 |
| Mosaicking |
Anyway, I shall off to try to do some podcast editing while I remain conscious.
-----
I ended up having an awful day on Monday with fatigue and a general feeling of unwellness. I crashed and had to rest all day. Still feeling tired but a bit stronger on Tuesday, I'm jotting a few things down while I prepare myself to try another free online course. The one I've just completed was a Future Learn course on tackling the Covid-19 outbreak, now being updated to run again in May. Know your enemy, right? It's really informative, but much of it quickly became out of date, and many of the measures it explains have frustratingly not been adopted by the UK government.
Looking towards employability (because at 35 with the qualifications and experience I've got I'm still struggling to get paid work) and what I can do to improve marketing the Audiovisual Cultures podcast, I've signed up to a course on Udemy to learn basic HTML. There was a time half my life ago when I could write basic web code, which I did for A-Level ICT. It may come of nothing, but at least being able to read and understand code will be a useful skill, especially as I use Linux Mint on my main computer. Well, here goes.
-----
It's Thursday now and the fatigue has allayed enough to now be categorised as severe tiredness, which washes over me in waves most strongly in the afternoon. I got up early again this morning to snatch some audio editing time, but it wasn't long before the other early bird in the house was up as well. It's about to turn 8am and I'm typing in bed. The casing on my main laptop is so warped that it can no longer be closed over without causing a little bit more internal damage each time. I've taken it apart and put it back together and tried all that stuff, but open it must remain and so I tend not to move it from the desk. The wee laptop I'm typing this with is a mini one with hardly any memory I bought during that brief moment when I had a well-paying unending contract - the one that obliterated my health three years ago - so I could work easily while travelling. I'm glad to have it, but I'm not sure I would succumb to such internalised institutional pressure anymore to consider all time as work time. But, then, this is a post about juggling work-life-home balances when they are forced to converge. Do we ever learn, or do we simply spiral around?
If you enjoy my posts, please consider donating to liberapay.com/peablair. Thank you!
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