How to tackle sleep and trees. (Or – How I kept myself awake during my weekend.)

I am just finishing my first grave yard weekend, and I have to say that it’s been nice. Work wasn’t at all bad this week, but (as I have said 100 times before) any time away from work is good time.
This week, I have had my sister and her son here from LasVegas. I wanted to hang out with her and my new baby nephew, so I decided to stay up all day on my Friday. That means that after I worked from midnight to 8am, I didn’t sleep, but stayed up and waited to sleep until normal sleep time. After all was said and done, I had stayed up for about 30 hours. Good? Bad? You Decide.

After work, around 2pm, I started to feel a bit sleepy and actually a bit drunk. So, like any good drunk man, I decided to destroy something. I took my chainsaw out to the backyard and cut down two trees. OK, so only one fell, but the other will probably go during some heavy winds. The one that is still up was leaning onto another tree to begin with, so with some help from good ol’ mutha nature, I expect my handy work to pay off in the future. It isn’t leaning towards anything and it isn’t anywhere that the kids would go, so I am not afraid of hurting somebody. I did try to get it down by pulling it with my jeep. (Here’s a pic of my son and I working on the jeep.) It didn’t work though, because I don’t have off-road wheels and a jeep isn’t exactly heavy. Mostly, I just made some mud holes and spun out a lot. It was good dirty fun, and I felt like a “manly-man” when I was finished. For a geek-techie like me, that’s saying something.

After my stint in the “forest”, I decided to come back inside and hang out with the family.
At around midnight I decided to call it a day (in actuality I was calling it 2 days) and got a good 9 hours of sleep. It was nice. I felt tired when I woke up, but not terribly. I am just wondering if I would feel better or worse if I had stayed on my normal graveyard sleep schedule. It was pretty easy staying up THIS time, but sometimes I get where I can’t even talk straight, let alone operate a chainsaw.
If I am able to keep my wits, I would like to keep staying up, because I feel like I get more time off and more time with my family. I just don’t want them to suffer if I become useless. I do know that if it gets too bad, my wife will brief me, and promptly order me to bed.
God, I love that woman.