Unexpected day off

I have tonight off. This would have been my second night of work for this rotation. Four days off, one day on, one day off, two days on, four days off...it gets confusing.

I tried to be semi-productive today, sort of. Grocery day is usually Tuesday, but when the shift starts on Saturday the apples and grapes I bought several days before tend to be less-than-fresh, or by Saturday have already been consumed beyond what will carry me through the next four days. This morning I only had to shop for two days, so I didn't really have to worry about the grapes lasting too long. Which is good, because the bag of grapes that I bought - the last one of the type that I like - looks well past its peak.

I took my mom to church this morning. 11:00 mass. By then I had already been up something like twenty-one hours. I nearly passed out several times, which would have been amusing, as I probably would have wrenched one or more of the pews off its moorings if I had fallen. I experienced a near-passing-out thing that I've never had before: everything went momentarily brown, with a shotgun-blast pattern of bright red in the center of my vision, a Gaussian distribution of red dots. This happened twice. I caught myself both times. After church I went home and slept for five hours.

This is almost, but not quite, what it looked like. If I spent a few more hours on this image, I could probably get it just right. Or I could have just grabbed an image of a globular cluster and colored all the stars red!

I did do something massively useful today: I figured out hot to get Hotmail to filter all of my Facebook e-mails into a separate Facebook folder. That way these e-mails don't crowd out everything else, and I can go to a single folder to catch up on what I haven't read from Facebook.

I also started reviewing some emails from an old friend who is no longer a friend anymore. Probably nothing will come of it, but I'd like to see where things went wrong.


For anyone who's interested, here's my work/off schedule for the rest of the year:

Work: Dec. 7, 8
Off: Dec. 9, 10, 11, 12
Work: Dec. 13, 14, 15, 16
Off: Dec. 17, 18, 19, 20
Work: Dec. 21, 22, 23
Off: Dec. 24, 25, 26, 27, 28
Work: Dec. 29, 30
Off: Dec. 31, Jan. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Please keep in mind that "Work" indicates a 12-hour work night, and I will be unavailable all of that day and part of the next (if I am not scheduled to work the next night.) All dates are subject to change due to layoff and overtime.