To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

When Hamlet gave his famous soliloquy with these words he was contemplating suicide. Thankfully, that has not been much in my thoughts (except for about 3 hours on Friday night when things were going particularly bad.) My thoughts have been more about peaceful sleep.

The long hours that we work here are not conducive to rest. We normally work at least 15 hours each day and sometimes as many as 19. When you finally get a chance to get to your room and lie down your mind is still churning away so that sleep doesn't come quickly or last very long. Couple that with the 11 hour time difference and the resulting jet-lag, and you can see that good sleep is hard to come by.

On Saturday night after our first day of taping our Director, Dennis, asked me to try and fix an annoying problem with the video output from my computer, a white raster flash that occured every time a new question was displayed. I worked from 8 until 10:30 on the problem without finding a solution, so I decided to 'sleep on it'. This was the first time since I had arrived that I had been able to get to bed before 1am, and in 6 nights in Uganda I had yet to sleep for more than 4 hours. I fell asleep quickly and slept well until about 2:30am when I woke up with the solution to Dennis' problem. Apparently sleeping on it actually works! I lay in bed for a while going over the solution in my head and was excited to find that it should actually work. Well, there was no more sleep to be had that night, so at 4:30 I got out of bed and showered and then headed down to the control room to re-program my application to institute the change. It worked perfectly, by the way.

Sunday night was my first good night's sleep. I got to bed at 10:30pm and woke to something I had never seen before in my room, and it scared me half to death. Daylight! I opened my eyes to see light coming through the window in my room and I bolted out of bed in a panic, thinking that I had overslept and was late getting down to the control room. Actually, it was only 6:45am, and I had plenty of time for a shower and breakfast before work, but the adrenalin rush lasted for several hours.

Monday night was another good night's sleep; I was actually awakened by the alarm on my cell phone, which I have turned on and put into Airplane Mode just so I can use it as an alarm clock. On Tuesday we had our fourth day of taping and finally reached the half-way point. It was my best day, energy-wise, so far.

Wednesday is a 'dark day' here, which is to say, a day off from taping. All of the participants and most of the crew were being sent out on tours to Jinja, the source of the Nile river. Mary also arranged a night out at a club for our crew on Tuesday night with a special reserved area for them with bottle service, all payed for by the production. This was a great chance for the crew to get together and socialize, blow off some steam, get rip-roaring drunk and then have the next day open to sleep it off.

As much fun as that sounded, I opted to stay at the hotel and turn in early again. Sleep is more fun.