When I wake up in the morning, my immediate thought/desire is: I want to go back to sleep. Yup, I'm one of the sleep-deprived masses--but I don't know why and I can't seem to break out of it. It's frustrating.

With only scattered exceptions when I'm totally exhausted, I'm averaging about 5 hours of sleep a night. I don't often augment that with naps or anything, though at least once a week I'll drop off for a half-hour or so without much warning. I can't remember the last time I really felt rested, much less awake. This has been going on for the better part of this year.

Yes, yes...some of this is likely an aftermath from my dad's illness. Not from depression, mind you (honestly, I don't notice any mental difference, and I have been paying attention), but from the strain of the past couple of years...and especially the last six months (or so) of my dad's life. It was the second hardest thing I've ever had to go through. The hardest thing was a protracted period of servitude in one of my jobs...a very long stretch of long hours, being on-call, multiple locations, and no days off for months on end. It took me more than two years to recover from that abuse...or mostly recover...so I probably shouldn't be surprised that the months of only getting about 3-4 hours of sleep a day last year might have some lingering effect. Regardless, it still sucks.

I've tried most things non-pharmaceutical to try to get the rest I need, but nothing has managed to take hold. I sometimes try to sleep every time that I'm, you know, sleepy; but life responsibilities rather interfere that. For some odd reason, people and businesses tend to not want to interact with you at 2am. Which is a pity, for I'll likely be awake at 2am.

The consequences of this constant fatigue are something I'm always mindful of. Driving is a special concern. I do not like driving when I'm tired. When I was younger and foolisher than I am now, I had a few instances where I was so tired I'd either fall asleep at the wheel or see hoards of gremlins dancing on the road in front of my car (that was fun). In a few weeks I'll be meeting a friend from high school at a location about 1.5 hours from my home. Not knowing how long we will be chatting on that day, instead of risking driving back tired, I've already conceded that I'll be fatigued and have booked myself a room so that I can rest before starting back home the next morning.

The biggest annoyance has got to be how this is draining my creative motivation. I have paintings to do that I have trouble focusing my eyes enough on for the works to be completed in anything approaching a timely manner. I also have writing projects to work on, but my mind is so addled by the time that I get to them that any effort on my part is mostly a waste of time.

Every now and again, though, I'll get a nice 7+ hours of uninterrupted sleep. Sometimes I'll even wake up from that stretch and feel rested for a while. But it doesn't last, sad to say. I'm hopeful that this condition will work itself out. I'm not sleeping quite as lightly as I was a few months ago, and that is very encouraging. I think.

Well, it's been a busy few days. We had a couple of new arrivals this past weekend and they have been keeping me pretty busy. Yup, you guessed it. On Saturday we were blessed with the coming of two happy and smiling...laptop computers! OK, I realize to most of you this is ho-hum, but to a geek like me, it's major.

I had been struggling for most of this year to come up with a way to replace my aged PDA. It has an internal battery that isn't the easiest thing to replace...in fact, trying to has a fair likelihood of me damaging something beyond repair. I'd thought about smart phones and newer PDAs, but none of them were going to do what I wanted. You see, as a writer, when I'm away from my home base, I'd like to be able to--you know--write. With my PDA I can do that easily since I have this snappy little fold-up keyboard.

The the arrival of the new Netbooks (or Ultra-low cost PCs), I thought I might have found my solution. Thing is, they cost almost as much as a low-end laptop. More than cost, though, the small keyboards and the lack of a track record with these machines gave me pause. So I took the coward's way out and decided to get a low-cost laptop.

In the end, I bought two HP Pavilion DV6809 computers. Why two? I'd been planning to buy a laptop for general home use (especially the budget) at some point this year, and since I was getting one, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Anyhoo...for the past several days I've been busy installing and configuring and all that other fun stuff. Perhaps the most time-consuming thing after getting the network to place nice between the various OSs was moving my XAMPP installation and my personal wikis onto a UFD (a/k/a a ThumbDrive). I can't depend on always having network access, so the only sane approach to have these oft-needed writing references available is to put them onto a portable format so that they are always available--unless I forget and leave the UFD at home.

The excitement of new installations is almost done. The hard work is done. Though I've have a few very frustrating moments, it was nice to exercise my inner nerd. Since I don't really work much on computers that don't happen to be here, that side of me hasn't gotten out too often. Maybe I should start learning a new programming language. Maybe that would help. Python. Maybe I'll learn Python. (Just so you know, the lack of working on computers isn't due to lack of opportunity, but simply the fact that I've done it for almost all of my adult life, and I'm a little bit tired of loaning myself out for that.)

My computer has at least finished its first task. I wrote a quick 5,600-word piece on how to fix our education system. You can read about it at http://hubpages.com/hub/Fixingthe-Education-System. It's funny...back in college I would have thought something like this was hard, if only for the length. Now, not so much (obviously, since I do it for fun).