Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

Every day this week I have been forcing myself to get up at 07:00. Naturally, I am somewhat of a nocturnal person, left to my own devices, the time I go to bed will get progressively later and later. Combine this with the fact that I have been unemployed for approximately the past 8 months, my sleeping schedule has fallen into what is "normal" for my body. The only limiting factor in this equation is the fact that I have two small children.

Toby has actually gotten pretty good at going to bed at a decent time. He used to be pretty much of a night owl, but (thanks to the efforts of my wife) has been managing to go to sleep at a normal time for a 2 1/2 year old boy on most nights.

Then there is Random… Much like her brother when he was younger, she tends to stay up fairly late. I am pretty good at getting her to sleep by standing up with her and rocking her, but that does not always work. I can only hope that in time, we will be able to get her to bed at an earlier time.

This will become very important to them as they get older and start going to school. I have always felt that school starts entirely too early. I understand most of the reasoning behind it. They try to get the kids to school before their parents would traditionally have to go to work, but it was always so early. I have always felt that my grades in school would have been better had I started even 2 hours later. Then again, maybe I should have just studied harder.

I will be starting my new job this coming Monday. I will be required to be in Ann Arbor by 8:00. My current wake time of 7:00 most likely won’t be sufficient. I plan on eventually pushing my alarm clock back another half hour tomorrow to get my body used to being a morning person once again. Once I have acclimated to 6:30, I’ll probably push it back again to 6:00. That should give me plenty of time to lollygag before having to go to work.

I went out to see Kali for lunch for the last time. I can’t even remember how I got started going out to see her. I used to go to Southgate all the time to see her when she worked at Homestead, and when she went to Shore, I just changed the way I turned to get on the highway. I’m going to miss our times together those afternoons. It was pretty much the only time I knew we would have together. After work, was always somewhat of a crap shoot. I have all these things to do on different given nights, and she has a boyfriend that takes up a good deal of her time. So I never know when I will be able to see her outside of work, but those lunch breaks were our time.

We went back to the park. It was such a great day. We sat on the dock and watched the fish jumping in the river. Okay, I saw the fish, she always missed them. It seems kinda ironic that I’ve driven that way so many times, and right before I could actually make use of that driving time, she quits her job.

The next thing I really did was I picked up John. We went over to Ryan’s house. I had him listen to the new Weird Al CD. They handed me a book on the fourth dimension. I tried reading it a little bit, but it was a little too off for me. (And I’m considered somewhat of an authority on the fourth dimension) I started getting this horrendous headache. I could feel the blood vessels on the side of my head throbbing.

We went over to Schnyder’s house for the jam. My headache was getting really bad. They started playing and it just got so much worse. I made it through only two songs before I just had to go. I couldn’t handle it anymore.

I went home and just laid in bed. I know that I was kinda wasting my Friday night, but I was in so much pain and I just really didn’t care. I watched the season premiere of Stargate. One thing I’ve noticed about that show… It’s really good, but by the end, I have no idea what’s going on anymore. I was trying to talk to Candice, and my IM window was over my TV window, and I’m not very good at moving windows using only a keyboard. I suppose I could have just gotten up, went to the other room and used the mouse, but I was just too lazy. Did I mention I had a really bad headache? After all that, I just went to bed.