Yesterday evening I finished my fifteen day of working through the Christmas holidays. The area of the refinery in which I work had to shutdown one of our "Reformer" units to fix some problems it was having. This caused a good number of us operators to work overtime through the holidays.

I did manage to be off work for 24 hours last Friday when I finished working graveyard shift at 6 AM and switched to day shift. I started my day shift at 6 AM Saturday morning. The boys and I took advantage of that widow of time off to go see a movie. We picked up MK's son and went to see Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Saturday evening we had Lisa's family over for a Christmas party. Lisa got it all together without any help from me, because I was at the refinery. All went well and everyone seemed to have a good time. Lisa made a crawfish bisque, and everyone else brought food and/or dessert.

Sunday, Lisa fixed a meal for her brother Troy and his sons, Eric and Shawn. Shawn flew in from Okinawa, where he is serving in the Air Force.

Our family opened Christmas gifts early. I had to work Christmas day, when this has happened in the past, we as a family, would open gifts on Christmas Eve. We could not do this our daughter Morgan had plans to be with her fiancee and is family for their family Christmas that evening. Therefore, we opened gifts on Monday, December 23.

The hardest thing for me during all this was getting enough sleep. I was never able to get my body clock properly adjusted back to sleeping at night. I did take an Ambien one night, but we had something going on just about every evening which kept me up late. I would sleep a couple of hours and then wake up and not be able to sleep. One night I got to sleep about 11:30, woke up at 2:30 AM and was unable to fall back to sleep. After 3 hours sleep I was up until I left the house for the refinery at 5:15 AM.

Our clean fuels unit (Unit from Hell or UFH) acted up everyday so we never achieved the quite laid back time at work that we like when working holidays. I'm glad it is over.

This morning I caught up with with sleep. I took an Ambien last night. I did wake once during the night. I was able to fall back to sleep, and did not wake again until 10:00 AM. Nice!

Later,
Kenith