This business of not sleeping, combined with that other business of not seeing anybody all day every day, is starting to make little inroads into my sanity. I’m teetering on the naked edge of the deep end about half the time. The rest of the time I’m okay. It’s a little hard to keep up with myself sometimes, because the mood curve swings up and down so radically.

Whenever I think I have a plan, I should really check it against reality to see how well it’s going to work. Leaving the phone on all night is something I have to do, at least until Kylie is born, but I tried to talk myself into the notion that it’s a good thing, because I didn’t have to worry about turning it back on first thing in the morning. I could just sleep in until the first time it rings. Sometimes that might not be until ten o’clock, and wouldn’t that make life a little zippier?

But no, it hasn’t worked out that way. Yesterday I had a phone call at 7:30 am. That’s way too early for me to be coherent, but I think I convinced the caller that I wasn’t the Icee company. I get that so often because their number is the same as mine, but with two digits transposed, and apparently ten digits are too many for Some People to dial without mixing a couple of them up. (I should know, since I’m often one of them.)

I’ve considered telling these ham handed callers that I’ll send someone out to fix their Icee machine right away, or giving them the Boss’s number and telling them to call him for service. They would have no idea what kind of service they’ll be getting, but I’ll bet they’d be more careful dialing the next time. But I’m always polite to these idiots. Way more polite than most of them, who seem to blame me for not being the person they’re trying to call.

Sometimes I’m not so sure who I am, but I’m almost always fairly certain of who I’m not. And I’m not the Icee repair dispatcher. It’s so hard to get back to sleep when you’re accused of misrepresenting yourself. It makes me wonder how politicians ever get any sleep.

Today I was rousted out of bed not by the phone but by someone knocking loudly on my door. I was sleeping so soundly that it took me a minute to convince myself that this was real knocking, not dream knocking. So I jumped out of bed and lit out for the door, only to realize that the knocking was coming from the kitchen. It was the refrigerator — specifically, the ice maker that isn’t connected but doesn’t know it isn’t connected. It knocks like that every so often, but this is the first time I’ve ever tried to answer it.