Paranoia demons

Being on night-shifts is hard. I work the eight or so (actually it has become more "so" as we keep getting extra hours) hours from 1am to 9am and then we go to breakfast/lunch at Denny's and return around noon. Then I read a while and try to sleep around one or two. Of course, as it is daylight and the cleaners don't understand what "Do Not Disturb" means (maybe in the Kanji it means "come and wake me up now"?), I don't fall asleep for some time. I then have to get up around 7 for dinner and then at 9 we return and I get another couple of hours sleep before shift.

Yesterday I must have fallen asleep around three or four only to wake up sometime gone five with fear. I felt incredibly paranoid and scared to go back to sleep. But I didn't know why. I tried to sleep for the next couple of hours but failed. Later that evening, in the pub- "Corkheads"- Leo said "Did anyone feel that earthquake earlier?". I realised that that must have been what woke me up. His comment triggered some memory of the earth slipping from beneath my feet. Apparently the NanoBPM group were having a meeting at the time and Steve Smith was the only one to have felt it. How strange that only he noticed the quake and yet it was strong enough to wake me up and give me paranoid thoughts.

Anyway, so I couldn't sleep and then went out, spent a fortune on a taxi back when I was too tired to socialise any more, bathed and slept. And now I am on Japanese time. Oops. Night shifts will start again on Monday. Ah well.

edit: http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/neic_ypai.html
Earthquake was magnitude 5.