Be not anxious

Rest easy, world! Mothers, tuck your children back in bed and whisper words of comfort in their ears. Be at peace citizens, for watchful eyes are over the glass plant while you sleep and night embraces the land.

In other words, I'm now working midnight - 8am for a month or so :-)

I volunteered for this shift to help out as we make some changes in how the tin bath is being run. There's another guy who's working 4 - 12, so between him, myself and the daylight folks, we've got 24-hour coverage for most of the week.

So how is it?

Well, things started out rough. I couldn't make myself go to sleep Sunday evening, so by the end of my first night I'd been going 25 hours straight. Worse than that, we had a size change (going to a different width and thickness of glass ribbon) that went awry and cost us a lot of production, and seemed to be due to me failing in my purported role.

Tuesday was better, since we didn't have any size changes, and the crew that was on for most of the night was one of the best. It got even better at the end as I talked to my boss when he came in. Turns out I did OK the night before, and the focus of the problem lay elsewhere. WHEW. I had had faith going into this, which turned to despair, but God didn't let me sink. I still need him every hour of every night, because I have a lot to learn about this process, and when things start going wrong, I don't have a big pile of experience to turn to.

Wednesday I tore my to-do list UP, baby! Good to feel productive, and to be so, demonstratively.

Tonight is real quiet, and the network is having issues, so I can't do most of what I need to do. Which is why I wrote this.

I'm sleeping fitfully (meaning I'm waking up 4 or 5 times) from 9 till 4 or so. I drag at the end of the night, but when the sun comes up, the day shift comes on, and the world wakes up, I get all perky again. Although I'm getting more sleep than before, it's not as deep. I ain't fooled by no shade over no window, bubba -- it's light outside and I know it!

Good: I still have evenings free, which is when other earthlings are typically free and foraging about for hang outage.
Bad: No more sleeping out on the deck. In fact, no more sleeping at night at all, which I find myself lamenting.
Good: The plant is peaceful, and I'm by myself at my desk.
Bad: Dismissing myself from whatever's going on at 11pm and going off, not to close my eyes in slumber, but to work a full workday. This was hard last night at the GROW picnic: saying my good-byes in the middle of everybody sharing what God had done over the summer.. leaving that rich group of people circled around the campfire, the warmth of fellowship and the glow of the firelight. It was also hard tonight, when I had to quick lay down my last idea for the bass line and shut the studio down in the middle of a spurt of jubilant inspiration on a new song. Oww my most of me! :-/
Good: Change, stretching, growth. God. God's presence. Which I need to remember and listen to more. But which is comforting nonetheless.

Time to go see how the tin bath is doing.

--JPB