Last night was my first night back to work after having 16 days off. Between work itself and the fact that I was up since 3pm yesterday, I’m pretty tired. I had planned to gradually adjust my sleeping schedule over a few days, but decided to go out drinking with some friends instead – so that ended up with me passing out earlier than I had planned, and no adjustment until the last minute :) Oh well, I don’t mind that so much, I find it easy to switch over just a couple of days.

Now, for the “decisions” part. There’s a job posting at work for Department Manager. The Dept. Manager for the area I work in (Chemicals) put in her notice yesterday. I knew she had plans to leave, but I didn’t know exactly when. Now, for a while I was thinking that I might apply for her job if she ever decided to leave, but I wasn’t expecting it so soon. I think I’d have a pretty good chance of getting the job, but I’m not really sure I want it. Despite the insanely busy nights and stupid stuff happening, I enjoy working nights. It’s relatively quiet in the store, and we (well, I do at least) get a fair bit of creative freedom in some things, and I mostly just get left alone to do my work (I guess that depends more on the department and person, than just in general). And, there are no customers to deal with :) Plus, I’ve always been a night owl – doing my best work at night.

So, I don’t know if I want to apply for that job or not. I don’t really have any plans to go higher in management, at least not at Wal-Mart. And I’d only want this Department Manager position because of the department. I’m going to have to think about this a lot over the next couple of days.

Well, it’s nearing the end of my vacation finally. I go back to work tomorrow night. It’s been a relaxing couple of weeks, and I managed to do some stuff that I normally don’t have a lot of time for. So, I really enjoyed my time off.

Of course, due to going out every night since Wednesday, I never managed to gradually adjust my sleeping schedule back to my normal. I’m going to have to stay up all night, which isn’t something I wanted to do. Oh well, I guess I’ll end up playing Icewind Dale 2 most of the night. It’s a cool game, and I finally got around to playing it recently. Partly due to some friends playing and talking about it. But as much as I enjoyed being off, it’ll be good to be back to work again. Some nights just got boring, with little to do. And just in time for the upcoming Christmas rush (although, it’s been rather hectic for months already).

I just don’t think I’m able to sleep as well during the night as I do during the day. Last weekend (my first scheduled long weekend), I ended up adjusting my sleep schedule a little so I could go to my aunt and uncle’s cabin for an afternoon. That weekend consisted of short bursts of sleep at a time, and generally feeling tired the whole weekend. I’ve been on my holidays since Saturday, and I’ve been adjusting so I would be awake during the day. The first night of sleep was fine, but last night I woke up every hour or so.

I think this is partly why some people feel like crap when they work night shifts. On their days off, they’ll stay up all that first day, go to bed that night, have a “normal” day the next day, and when they have to go back to work, they end up being awake for near 24 hours. I felt like shit after doing that last weekend, I don’t know how people can handle doing that every week. Another thing is going to sleep right after getting home from work – and waking up 4 or 5 hours later. Maybe having a nap in the evening. By the time they get off, they’re practically falling asleep (which isn’t good if you have to drive home). No wonder they are always tired and/or sick. That sort of thing is hard on the body. Personally, I tend to keep the same sleeping pattern – go to bed around 2pm, wake up around 8pm. Then work from 11pm to 7:30am. Much easier.

I’d like to say that my vacation has been good so far, but I haven’t really done anything yet. Which is pretty good in itself ;) I’ve been preparing my Pentium Pro system to replace my current Linux box acting as the main server here, so when I get the upgrades I got on eBay, the downtime will be minimal. I was planning to upgrade my own computer in October, but that’s going to have to wait a little longer now, because I wasn’t planning on upgrading the Linux box until later. But hardware problems forced that upon me. I had to readjust my budget for the next few months, but all is good. At some point, I’ll get my Ultra 5 system running, but that’s not a high priority. It’s warm enough in here during the summer with 2 computers running, 3 or 4 is just insane.

So, I had a really good time on Sunday at my aunt and uncle’s cabin in Howley. It was a beautiful day, and their cabin is in an excellent spot. Right next to the water, lots of privacy, and a nice A-frame cabin. My camera was almost full from taking pictures all day – the 32 MB card couldn’t hold any more (81 pictures there, I think), and I could have only taken maybe 6-8 more using the internal memory (16 MB) on the camera. I think I need to get a bigger card sometime :)

You can view all of the pictures I uploaded on my gallery, of course. But here are a few samples:

I haven’t had much of a chance to actually be outside doing things so far this summer. Most of the time I’m too tired to do anything in the mornings after work, and when I wake up it’s really too late to do stuff other than get ready for work again. But I have two weeks off starting this Saturday, so I’ll be sure to get out and do things then.

I finally have most of my weblog using my new design, I’m just having some minor problems with the trackback stuff. Nothing really important. The comment pages aren’t validating properly yet either, but they display fine. So I’m not as worried about that for now.

I’m still on my first scheduled long weekend. My sleep schedule is totally messed up, because I’m going to my aunt and uncle’s cabin later today for a barbeque. I’m sure I’ll be back to normal for Monday night when I have to work again. We got at least one new part timer at work now, too. He started tonight. Hopefully they hire a few more people next week. I also got my raise on my last paycheque. It’s still nowhere near what I should be getting paid for the amount of work I do, but I’m happy enough with it.

Now that I’m mostly done with hacking on this web page, I think I’ll go watch a movie or have a nap or something.