I had almost as hard a time getting moving this morning as I had getting started on an entry tonight. I should never have read that article about how people really only need six and a half hours of sleep a night, because I’m already working out ways to bargain it down to five and a half. Then we’ll be talking in the same language. Then we’ll be playing in the same ballpark.

I’m not sure I believe it, about the six and a half hours, but I desperately want to believe it. I’ll never get more than that, not at night. I might be able to stretch out my sleep time to seven or eight hours if I’m allowed to sleep late on weekend mornings. Actually, I could do it any day I’m allowed to sleep in, but somehow the phone always manages to ring just at the point when I’m finally getting that rich REM sleep. On weekdays, that is. I don’t let the phone ring on weekends.

But here I am writing, so obviously I did get up this morning. I even got the maximum amount of possible work done today. I’m not sure how I can quantify that to make it make sense, but there’s a limit to what I can do on a day when I oversleep (even a little), and it’s too hot (way too hot), and the frustrations and interruptions come in whole battalions.

That’s actually what I’m avoiding writing about, because you don’t want to hear it and I don’t want to go through it again. Let’s just say this was a day when my destination was barely worth the hardships of the journey. Not to go all pioneer on you or anything.

Because I can’t let it go completely, I’ll just say that I find banks to be very frustrating institutions to try to work with. They don’t care if you’ve paid your credit card bill on time every month for the last ten years. If they forget to send you a statement (or, more likely, the post office delivers it to somebody else), they’ll go after you with a chainsaw before they’ll let you try to explain. And that’s even if, as soon as you realize you didn’t get a statement, you immediately go on line and make a payment.

And then you send them two emails (because the first one didn’t go through the proper channels, which you didn’t even know existed), explaining the situation and begging them to let you back into their good graces (not to mention their zero percent interest until January). And they promise you an answer within twelve hours, and then nothing. It’s almost enough to make a person pick up the phone and call them. Almost.