Monday 30 March 2026: Disturbed sleep

Today’s blog post would normally be a book review. But as I’ve completely stalled on a book I was reading for review (not sure I’m going to do the formal review as I don’t like to give less than 3 stars), and as the monthly wrap-up isn’t until tomorrow, I decided to do a Friday blog post instead. The weekend catch up will follow after the new month ahead post on Wednesday.

So, Friday…I’d had another bad night.

First of all, the poet had a nasty asthma attack at bedtime that lasted long enough. The antihistamine I’d taken because my skin was itching gave me horrendous heartburn in the middle of the night (they know it gives us heartburn because they tell us under no circumstances to take heartburn medication within 4 hours either side of taking the antihistamine…), and that kept me awake for an hour or so. And then, an hour or so later, the dog was sick and that had to be cleaned up. By now the poet was practically comatose, but it had woken me up.

I think I finally drifted off to sleep again at about 7:55am…and then we were up again because the dog was hungry – probably after being sick – and it was obviously time to get up.

I had a slow and lazy start over my dirty cuppa and ended up going over my half hour, but in order to catch up a bit I only read one chapter for each of the 2 books I’m reading, the novel, Kill Game, and the writers’ guide, Writing Into the Dark.

Before I got dressed, I got some washing out of the tumble dryer, folded it and put it away, I put another wash through the washing machine, and I emptied the dishwasher. I have to do this before I get dressed because otherwise the dog thinks it’s time for his walk, as clearly the only time I ever get dressed is when I’m taking him for his walk…

Once dressed, I didn’t feed the garden birds this time because we’re leaving it until they’ve picked all the trays clean to keep rodents and diseases at bay. We’re topping everything up roughly every 2 days.

We have to be careful this time of year because the birds are already pairing up and laying eggs. I found an entire blackbird’s egg on the grass last week (as opposed to one that’s been pecked or gnawed) and thought it must have fallen out of a nest, but the poet said it was too early for the blackbirds to be laying in nests and the female probably just had an infertile egg she needed to get rid of. So she left it on the lawn…

The poet had back-to-back Teams meetings, so I got the dog ready and we went on his walk. I thought he was good on Thursday’s walk, but on Friday he was even better. There were 2 people ahead of us, one with 2 dogs and one with 1 dog. He could see them, and he was getting a bit excited, but he didn’t pull, again, and he didn’t bark, again. And when we went in a different direction, he just gave them a single glance then got on with his own walk.

When we got back he had a mad run around the garden while I made a cup of tea, and I settled down to write my morning pages at my desk. This time it was a bit of a waffle, a bit of a ramble, but I got something out of my head and onto the page that had been bothering me during the night when I was trying to sleep (mind hive). My brain seemed to be content with that and stopped fretting.

Next job was Friday’s blog post, which I hadn’t done the day before.

Then next, I watched Week 2 of the writing into the dark workshop. And I went straight into Assignment 2. Again, I didn’t think I’d come up with anything, but he’d given us a good tip in the workshop that I applied and I ended up with just over 500 words again. The target is 500-600 words of an opening to a story.

Over my afternoon meal I installed the Kindle app for Mac. I’d deleted it ages ago, but the 2 books I was reading were both on Kindle but one of them wasn’t on Kobo. So I was reading them both on the Paperwhite and wanted to carry on reading and keep my notes to myself (annotations). I could have read them on Google Play Books, but that doesn’t sync with the Paperwhite, so I relented and installed Kindle on the Mac again.

I’d already replaced the editing hour with the assignment hour and moved the editing to this week, and that meant the only job I had left, aside from today’s blog post, was the take one idea for this month’s writing prompts series. But after more than one disturbed night (and without any nanna naps!), I was just too tired, so I moved that to this week as well.

Finally, I rattled off today’s blog post, chose the image, scheduled it on here and on Patreon, and closed the office down for the weekend. The poet didn’t need much convincing to follow me and bring his laptop with him.

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.