Had a mildly freaky thing happen to me today, and I thought I should write it down here.

First, last night’s little get-together went off OK. I cooked the mini-pizzas and they were quite good despite the fact they got a little burned around the edge.

I baked them for the time the packaging said, and so I am annoyed at the company for that. But then again, I checked them five minutes before they were supposed to be done, and I said to myself “Gee, these look like they are already done to me!”, but I put them back in for the rest of the time anyhow, and so I blame myself more than the fine people at Sabatto’s.

I have pretty good instincts when it comes to cooking. I should listen to them more often.

Oh well. We have another 12 in the freezer, and when I make those for tomorrow night’s supper, I will bake them for less time and they will be even tastier than before.

I was particularly happy that I liked these frozen mini pizzas, because I do not like any of the Pillbury variants. They all have some weird note to the flavour of the sauce that I just cannot stand. Seriously, it makes my throat try to close, which is a pretty clear message from one’s body : DO NOT EAT THIS. The very thought of it makes my stomach squirm.

But these are quite nice, even slightly charred. And they were on sale at Costco, 7.99 for a dozen, so I figure they were a pretty good value, too.

53 cents for a tasty mini pizza? Works for me!

Most of the invited guests showed up sooner or later, although one I was particularly keen to see did not, and I was quite disappointed about that. But he had two emergencies, one a family tragedy and the other a case of “hey, nobody from our group showed up for Pride duty!”, the combination of which meant he spent Sunday manning a booth at Pride, then getting on a plane for Calgary to attend a funeral.

Poor dear. I do not blame him at all for missing our own little lazy soiree. I am sure I will catch up with him soon.

And at least we didn’t have any sudden uninvited guests like these people did.

Those nice folks were having a pleasant pool party in Africa when a friendly neighborhood elephant decides to drop in for a quick drink. But then, and this is my favorite part, the elephant apparently senses the social awkwardness and decides to back out of the situation apologetically.

I totally identify with that elephant. Big, fat, clumsy, socially awkward. I am that elephant.

I figure the elephant’s inner monologue as being something like this :

“Derp a derp a durr, just wandering through the forest, looking for something to drink. Hey, look, a pool of water! And what a pretty color it is. Welp, guess I will just help myself. Snooooooork it up, and then…. hmm, this stuff tastes weird. It almost tastes like the smell of….. humans? Oh crap, I am surrounded by them, aren’t I? No wonder it got so quiet. Uh…. hey, great party! Nice… um… human… stuff. Oh, look at the sun. Time for me to go. Lots of leaves to munch and foliage to trample, you know how it is… so I guess I just…. uh…. yeah. ”

A very human reaction from a very elephantine elephant. My heart goes out to him.

Oh right, the weird thing that happened. Well, during the course of last night’s festivities, I consumed an entire 2L bottle of cheap generic diet cola. That meant that I had a lot of caffeine in my system. So I was fairly dubious that my sleeping pill would make a dent in all that caff, and so I was pretty sure I would not be sleeping for a while.

And sure enough, I took the pill at 5 am, and still could not get to sleep by 6 am, so I decided to get up and have breakfast and then try again.

This I do, despite not feeling a heck of a lot sleepier after eating. It takes a while, but eventually I get back to sleep at something like 7 am.

I wake up feeling more or less refreshed, stretch, feeling fairly decent, and do my usual thing of wondering what time it is and making a guess before actually getting up and looking at the clock.

I figured, based on previous patterns, that it would be around 10:30 am.

It was almost 4 pm! Holy crap!

That was a fairly profound moment of subjective temporal dislocation there. I never sleep for that long! I had slept right through lunchtime, almost to early evening. Not only was my blood sugar low from not eating, but I had missed my chance to go to a friend’s yard sale. And I had really been looking forward to doing that. A chance to both help out a financially imperiled friend and pick up some books I have no read? Count me in!

But I missed it! Dammit.

I am mostly over the feeling of dislocation in time, though not quite over the feeling that I just plain lost most of today. Like I just plain skipped it. Went into a tunnel in time and came out the other side, dazed and confused.

That too will fade in time. It is odd to imagine that somehow the secret to my getting a normal amount of sleep is to combine a lot of caffeine and Zopiclone, but it is not impossible. There have been times when caffeine actually made me sleepy, which I think is a sign that I am radically overtired and hence a stimulant actually boosts me up just enough to let me relax enough to sleep.

Throw in some Zopiclone, and maybe you really do have a recipe for me actually sleeping eight hours in a row like a normal person.

Stranger things have happened.