Naps

I have to say, I'm really going to miss the afternoon naps when I start working again.

I haven't really napped in years; probably since college. It's funny, I can still remember hating "nap time" in kindergarten, when you had to lie on these thin gray-brown segmented mats on the parqueted linoleum of the classroom with the lights out, when you just wanted to do, I dunno, probably just about anything but lie still on the floor in a darkened classroom. And then sometime in high school, it seemed only natural to take a long nap immediately after getting home from school (probably for 2-3 hours) and then waking up for dinner, TV and bed again. (I think I managed to do most of my homework at school during free periods.)

Napping is a lot harder to do when you're working or when you're out and about or when you have things that need to get done. You're just too busy to nap. I'm sorry, power naps don't count. (Although I have to admit that 10-15 minutes can do a decent job of recharging me.) And I think at some point I also started to worry that it would just make it more difficult to get to sleep at night, especially when I had to be up the next morning.

But now with my more, uh, flexible schedule, none of those things are really a problem -- I've probably napped every single day this past week.

And it's not like I'm even keeping particularly weird hours right now: I don't go to bed particularly late, and I'm not getting up particularly early. But for whatever reason, my body just seems to want to shut down sometime in the mid-afternoon and I need to be horizontal. I occasionally experienced this feeling in the past, but generally speaking, sacking out at your desk tends to be frowned upon by the management-types.

I dunno. Maybe it's the shorter days. Or the mid-day long runs. Or just a by-product of an unstructured schedule.

Regardless, I seem to be getting my nap on, and I'll enjoy it while I can.

And the KTUs (Kitty Thermal Units) are a nice bonus.