Sleeeep. And, jobs for insomniacs.

I'm feeling really frustrated because my sleep cycle has gotten off-kilter. Again. This time I know why -- because I had to get up early (for me) on Friday. Which meant I took a little nap on Friday afternoon. Which turned into a 6 hour nap. Which meant I stayed up all night Friday night. And rinse, repeat. So here I am waking up at 10:30 pm Sunday evening. And how's the weekend been for you?

It has been pleasant listening to the birds sing outside the windows in the morning. After a while, it gets so hot  in Florida mornings they just say the heck with it and go back to sleep. In Vermont spring, when you had just started to keep your windows open at night to enjoy the fresh air after months of claustrophobia, the bird chorus would start up at about 4 am. And steadily increase in volume as the late-risers joined in. You can throw a boot at cats (at least, that's what I've seen in cartoons), but nobody has enough shoes to throw at a whole treefull of birds desperately trying to get laid.

Once during a dark Vermont winter when I was sleeping days and staying awake nights, I was inspired to "make lemonade" by getting a job delivering newspapers. "I'm awake," I told myself. "Might as well try to make some money."

Well, let me tell you about delivering papers: the hours are lousy but the pay sucks. It was for a mere pittance that I got out of the house at 3:30 am (the papers had to be picked up by 4:00) and drove down to the Grand Union grocery to get my bundles of papers, driving around the route designated by a daily paper printout (so you know if Mr. Smith is on vacation and doesn't want his paper, etc.) Papers had to be delivered by 6:00 am on weekdays, and 7:00 am on Sundays, so I could lollygag around on Sunday mornings if I wanted to.

It sounds simple, just cruising around tossing papers out of the car onto folks' driveways, hardly pausing to toss it, not caring if it landed under the car or in the bushes. But this wasn't a normal suburban route. South Burlington is sort of an urban/suburban blend. And people expect their papers to be on their porch, thankyouverymuch, especially on a snowy winter morning. If you toss it on a driveway there's a chance it will be covered by a snowplow and irretrievable until Spring when the snow melts.

So I would have to stop the car, get a chunk of papers, and trudge around in the snow putting the news on porches, in people's mailboxes, hanging them on doorknobs, as requested by my handy little printout. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, how many stops I needed to make, how many papers I could deliver at one time before I had to get back in the car and drive a little further. As I mentioned, this was in the dead of the Vermont winter, so it would frequently be snowing, and snowing hard. There were bright spots, though. For one thing, since it was December, it was Christmas bonus season, so I was frequently the recipient of gifts bestowed as thanks for the last person's hard work.  Also, there were twinkling lights on many houses, so I wasn't always working in total darkness.

In fact, there was one light display, kept burning all night, that was so impressive I'm surprised that the nearby airport didn't complain. Let alone the power company. It blazed so brightly that I had to take off my coat and apply sunscreen as I trudged across the lawn, past the twinkling bushes and the illuminated grazing deer and the jolly glowing Santa. Then I would stumble into darkness again having been temporarily blinded by the amount of lumens provided.

On Sundays, my teenage daughter would sometimes come with me and help. This was helpful, because of course Sunday papers are the heaviest of the week, and kind of fun, because by the time we finished the sun would actually have deigned to glow on the horizon, so we got to meet the dawn together. As long as I paid her.

Occasionally I would top the day off by eating breakfast at Denny's, that American haven for insomniacs and early-risers alike. There's something especially friendly about an early morning breakfast at a diner, even if you are having a hamburger for dinner before going off to bed.

It ended one snowy night on an icy sidewalk. I was already having problems with my shoulder from carrying and tossing the papers (after a while, I could generally hit the porch from the sidewalk without having to walk all the way). I slipped on a patch of ice which had been deceptively covered by fresh snow, and there went my shoulder. I called the newspaper and left a message and drove myself to the hospital. They said it was only a subluxation not a dislocation. They didn't say that I had to quit, but I couldn't really take days off either. And somehow my boss hadn't gotten the message and was royally pissed off at the calls they were getting about undelivered papers. And my arm hurt, so screw you, newspaper.

So that was the end of my newsboy career. It lasted about two months, which was about how long I managed to work most jobs. So the late nights and early mornings didn't really pay off for me. But it was a memorable experience, trudging through the snow on early December mornings, walking boldly onto strangers' porches while they were sleeping soundly within, traipsing through neighborhoods, kind of like Santa Claus myself, delivering parcels that would be opened and greeted with cries of, "Damn politicians," and "That Garfield, he's so funny," or "They lost again?"

And that's my story.