Uberman On-Ramp Day 3: Last Report

Damn, that sounds official, doesn't it? You'd think I was planning a deep space probe launch or something.

A total of 45 minutes lying down today, earplugs in, sleep mask on. No naps. Kind of "hypertired" as an old girlfriend used to say, from business demands and getting up earlier than usual. Drowsy from lack of caffeine, but unable to sleep.

I must start keeping a catalogue of Potential Interruptions and Solutions. Take my cats. Please. Cats know exactly one word of felinese, and it translates roughly as "Why the frak haven't you fed me yet? I've been hungry for several minutes, now!" There are various intonation patterns implying an infinite spectrum of guilt-trips, some of them employing frequencies they must have picked up from hearing fingernails raking across blackboards.

Way to cope: make sure the cat food dishes always have enough to tide them over any 25-minute lapse of operation in the Feeding Machine AKA Me.

And my wife just interrupted this blog entry with another one: it's time to go to the laundromat. Again. Second time today. (11 guests from France -- 10, really, with one more arriving tomorrow. Running a 6-room bulging-at-the-seams ryokan means going through a lotta towels, sheets and pillowcase every week.) Solution: stay on top of it, so she doesn't even have to ask. She lets it pile up. I have to sneak it out under her nose sometimes, just to get it done.

Phone calls: I have to set up space away from the business phone (we're on cordless here, so mainly that's a matter of moving the handset to another room), and always remember to turn off my mobile. I'd say one out of every three nap attempts in recent months has been interrupted by the phone.

Less manageable: customer arrivals. Guests can be as much as three hours late. Maybe a prominent sign would work, when I can't have my wife fill in for me: "Back in 20 minutes -- your faithful concierge." It would only have to work once in a while.

I must say I have it easy, though, compared to many attempting polyphasic schedules. No school. No job with a boss (unless my wife counts, and she does, sort of.) No irritating social demands, except for that guy who moved to Okinawa but still calls me at all hours for help configuring his Linux boxes, oblivious to my protests that I actually don't know what the hell I'm talking about in that department.