Loyal Reader Brad (http://soporverity.blogspot.com/ ,) has threatened to turn me in for "digital neglect" for not blogging in twenty days. As I wrote him a note explaining why this is so, I realized that I had a topic for this post.

Right now,I am going through an annual event in which I have managed to get so sleep starved that my intelligence and creativity have been reduced nearly to the level of someone who calls Michael Moore a "documentary" film maker. We can call it the yearly Circadian Crash.

What happens, is that I get in a reversed cycle during the darkest part of the winter. I tend to stay up later and later until I'm not going to bed before 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning.

Unfortunately, I don't compensate by sleeping in until evening. Other people think it a moral failing to sleep the murky, dark, frozen, wet day away and encourage me to get up and involve myself in cheerful activities like early unscheduled Parks board meetings, jail guarding, EMS runs, harassing phone calls and so forth.

I should mention that this week, I'm engaged in one of my favorite sleep-starved activities, namely, upgrading the several databases and their interfaces that I've put together for my Forest Service Supervisor, "C."

C's idea this week, is to give several people who are unfamiliar with the structure and protocols of my databases access to them, for the purpose of altering the data. So, between bouts of falling asleep at the keyboard, I am wildly entering code to make the interfaces bullet proof and giving the structures error trapping routines in a no-doubt futile effort to keep the data more relevant than that provided by say, a Magic 8 Ball.

C is not a computer person, statements to him to the effect that "whatever you do, don't press that button," will almost inevitably be followed by a small "clacking" sound. So he doesn't really seem to understand why letting people who think that "data" is an android enter information at will into complex matrices is a bad idea - scratch that - a terrible idea.

Analogies such as recruiting organic farming majors to perform watch repair go quite unheeded. Disaster looms.

I feel quite comfortable mentioning this, as he has about the same chance of navigating to this site that a duck has of getting first class airline seating for the annual migration.

For two weeks, I'm being forced back into "regular waking hours" by working at the Forest Service office. Sadly, I'm not yet getting a healthy amount of sleep. Sunday and Monday nights next week, I'll have 6:00pm to 6:00am power plant shifts followed by 8:00am to 4:00pm Forest Service shifts. Once this hurtle is cleared, I hope to be blogging once more with the finesse, style, consistency and charm that my adoring droves (a drove is here defined a six persons) have come to expect. Well, "drove" anyway.