I’m yawning over and over today, because I need to time shift again. I need to be awake during the day so I can do grocery shopping, but that means I can’t sleep today. This is something I used to do twice a week, every week, when I was working compressed shifts over at TI, but that was thirty-some years ago when I had more stamina.
Now I have a condition called Delayed Sleep Response, or as I like to call it Alien Planet Circadian Rhythm. If left to my natural inclinations I have a 28 hour wake/sleep cycle. If I don’t use an alarm to wake up I stay up about 20 hours and then sleep 8 which time-shifts me about 4 hours later a day every day, until I wake up about the time regular people go to bed, when everything gets crossways. What I usually do is when I start waking up in the afternoon I just push it a bit harder so I go to bed about 2000 instead of 0800. This means I stay up 32 hours instead of “just” 20, but for a few days I’m almost sorta in sync with the rest of the world. Now if I set my alarms to only sleep 6 hours instead of my full 8 I can stay up 18 instead of 20 hours and hold a diurnal schedule, but the problem is the Delayed Sleep Response, it keeps me from feeling tired when I should, plus I got used to just “not sleeping” even when I was tired from all those years of going from 12 hour night shifts to sleeping at night by just powering through getting tired and staying awake f-o-r-e-v-e-r. I always made sure I didn’t need to be alert when I did that, so I wouldn’t be in danger.
Right now I have another 6.5 hours to stay awake before I can get some sleep, so I’m reading some web comic archives to stay awake. I hope they will be interesting enough to keep me awake. And that’s pretty much it, the most interesting thing today is I won’t be sleeping until 2000 or so. And then I’ll probably sleep until 0400 tomorrow.
Witch on a Bicycle 
I think you are better off with a 28 instead of a 24 hour wake/sleep
cycle. Now, let’s make up some numbers:
-Your store is opened from 8am to 8pm every day.
-You need three hours from the time you leave until you return.
-Does the following wake-up times have a three hour window:
midnight-yes
4am-yes
8am-yes
noon-yes
4pm-yes
8pm-yes
Granted, 4pm is cutting it close.
Let’s face it, those of us who have been into cycling for so long
had never been seen as normal. So why should we start now?
We should just go with our natural inclinations.
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My problem is the rest of the world is living on a 24 hour cycle. And I’m not active for most of the active parts of that schedule. I have to grocery shop when the grocery store and pharmacy are open, otherwise I don’t get my meds and suffer because of that.
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