The Tired Rant

Warning - there is no spanking in this post at all.

I need to get more sleep. I'm an 8 hours a night girl. However, during the week I generally get 6 hours or less sleep...I start to function less and less well the less sleep I get... and become a grumpy bitch, and not a pleasure to be around. If you do the sums, I probably need 40 hours sleep during the working week and get 30. Which is a fairly big shortfall. In all fairness, if I manage 7 hours a night I'm just about bearable, so maybe that's what I should aim for.

You think it would be easy, right? My alarm wakes up at 6. So I'd need to go to sleep at 11pm to get in seven hours. Except from when I *think* about going to bed to when I actually turn off the light and sleep is usually about an hour. You know, faffing, moisturising, teeth cleaning, reading, winding down, tossing and turning. So that means I need to start getting ready for bed at 10pm. The only problem with this is that I'm basically a night owl. So around 9/10pm is often when I being productive. I'm at my awakest (yes, it's a word!) just at the point where I have to be going to bed. It was wonderful when I was a student in Spain. We never had classes before 3pm, so I very quickly fell into a routine of waking up about 11, and going to bed about 2/3am. It suited me perfectly. I think that's probably what my natural body clock would like to work to. People have always said to me that "Oh, you'll get used to getting up early, you know: at the weekends, I'm wide awake before my alarm even goes off". Well I'm sorry, they are wrong. I've been working for 10 years now and I have NEVER got used to waking up at 6am. I may wake up at 6am at the weekends, but it's generally only to grunt, roll over, and go back to sleep again till a decent hour. I loathe getting up at 6am, I loathe not actually feeling awake until about 10am any morning. And I especially hate that any time I go out and stay out past about 10pm, I know that I'm going to pay for it the next day.
Whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge... sorry, what can I say - I'm tired!!
Oh, and the first person to suggest the "creative" solution to my issue that one of you clever clogs is *bound* to suggest will get a slap round the head. It may be a virtual slap, but I'm sure I can make it hurt nevertheless. (And any of you who know me in real life and feel like making any clever suggestions, yours will be a *real* slap round the head. And it will be hard.)
I'm going off to kick some car tyres and be grumpy and tired now.