New Schedule So Far

Results have been rather mixed. I've run the schedule 3 times, and really not even once have things gone extremely well. First of all, traffic is just not beatable. This morning I left the house at 5:15am, and yes I did beat traffic, but when I left at 6 and 5:45 the days before it was till horrendous. Also I had a 77 minute commute home yesterday (thanks to the rain), and still got bonked by traffic today even though I left the casino at 2:30pm. So on that front it appears that the urban waste land could actually be unbeatable, at least with regards to attempting to still work "days". Like yeah I could leave at 5am and beat it on the way in, but I still couldn't win on the way home and it's already too early. Waking up at 6am is borderline doable. Waking up at 4:30 or 5 simply is not, as getting enough sleep becomes almost completely impossible (if I ever want to see Danielle). And that brings us to the next big fail, that being that even if I do attempt to go to bed at 10 (which again isn't really early enough) it drastically cuts the time her and I have to spend together. Last night she got home at 9:15. Tonight it's going to be later than that because of basketball. If I continue to work this schedule we'll have to find some sort of compromise, and I just don't see how one can be worked out. I basically haven't seen her since Tuesday, and if I'm sticking to my guns I need to go to bed BEFORE she gets home tonight. It's just not gonna work. And to top it all off, having a few hours at home to yourself once a week is great. Getting home at 4pm 4 or 5 days a week simply isn't something I'm currently wired for. I'd need to come up with some activities, or something, but the truth of the matter is there just aren't a whole lot of things going on before, you know, everyone is done with work. So far I've been watching a lot of law and order and getting really good at Carcasonne, but that's getting pretty old. In theory I should be able to fill the time pretty well, and I guess I could learn, but these last few days I've been so tired it just hasn't gone very well.

This is all kind of sad, because the schedule has objectively helped a lot in terms of solving the main problem. Specifically the games in the morning have been much less combative and angry, and in general I've been coming home pretty happy about the world. Basically I've managed to put a peaceful and calm part of my day first, which doesn't do much in terms of chipping away at my emotional armor. Then I work my shift, make a serious effort not to react to things, and then boom it's 3pm and I head home. Like, this is definitely doable. But the catch is that all the problems I listed above still make me feel like poker has completely taken over my life. Like, I'm still not doing ANYTHING else, and now I don't even have those few hours at night to spend with Danielle. I come home, I tool around on my computer, watch Law and Order, am generally exhausted, then go to bed. And that just pretty much sucks.

So to make a long story pretty short, I'm not sure how well this is going to work out. I could go to the Big Potato schedule strategy, which is to not really have a schedule and sleep just sort of whenever you can fit it in. But realistically I'm not capable of that. I could just try to do the early thing 2 days a week, but that will likely result in me being tired 100% of the time (which I guess is the result I'm seeing right now so I suppose that's not actually too awful). So for now the plan is to try to come up with a few tweaks and see if the basic principle of the schedule can be saved. But to be honest, I'm not very hopeful.