Ugh. Tired. The good news, like I said, is that I'm getting forty hours this week. And at least I made them give me an hour break for agreeing to do so - pfft, like I was going to say no. Still one tired minotaur, me. I spend half my break actually dozing off over my sketchbook. The other half though, is spent working on my latest doodle. A hippocampus. I dunno why, I just had the urge. Blame my friend AL, I guess. She got me going on an ocean-critter kick.

Other news - I'm staying at my mom's so I don't have to get up at 6:30 in the morning so I can be at work on time at 8. Sometimes, EJ ain't bad to be around - we can talk and have an interesting conversation, and hang out a bit, and it's fine, even rather enjoyable. Other times, I just want to throttle him for whining. This work-enforced stay has included a little of both, and a rather alarming morning. To elaborate - a couple days ago, my brother had a friend of his over at the house, and they stayed up late, and his friend slept over. Neither case is out of the ordinary. The next morning, fairly early, he drove his friend home.

Allow me to digress for just a moment. This morning, like all of the ones I'm spending here at my parents' house, I had to go to work. To get there at 8, I needed to wake up at 7. With the exception of this very morning, despite me asking to be woken up, since they have no spare alarm clock (that functions), this has not happened. It's just been fortunate that my internal clock has prodded me awake at least in time to throw on my uniform and dash out the door on subsequent mornings, but that particular one, my mother woke me up at a quarter to eight. So I was already going to be late. Not that it was going to be wholly my mother's fault, mind you. I discovered that I'd also forgotten to throw my uniform from the washer to the drier. -_- I called work and told them why I'd be late. Once my clothes were dry, I got ready, and was about to walk out the door, when my mother got a phone call. I swear, if I were superstitious, I would have thought something didn't want me to get out of bed.

Back to my brother. That phone call? Him. He was distraught to say the least, and about the only thing my mother could get out of him past the tears was that he'd been in an accident (He's only recently gotten his license and uses my mom's car), he wasn't hurt, no one else was either, and it was about half a mile down the road from the house. This is not as innocuous as it sounds - a quarter mile away is on highway 156, a two lane freeway nestled between agricultural fields that has two entrances along it for the housing complex my parents live in. I drove my mom to the site, and found two other vehicles - a minivan and a sportscar - along with three cop cars. The minivan had lost a bumper, and I never did see what kind of damage the sportscar sustained. The car my brother was driving was banged up - the front headlight was ripped clean off, and the front corner is munched, and there are scrapes and a dent in the back - over $3000 worth of repair work, according to the estimate. I don't know yet what the insurance is going up to, or the bill for the other people's cars. He'd fallen asleep at the wheel, swerved right, then tried to correct and was unable to do so, swerving into the left lane. Incoming traffic. He is very, very lucky no one was hurt, or even killed. He was shaken up pretty badly, kept apologizing to the cops and to the other drivers. I can't blame him. I probably would have been doing the same thing too. But it's a sobering thought, how much could have changed in an instant. He came closer than I did.

It made me think though, about the time I learned about falling asleep at the wheel. I can't remember how old I was, whether I was licensed or still on a permit. Licensed, I think. It was on the way to San Jose, to see family - and my mother got tired, wanted to sleep. So she pulled over, and I took the wheel. I can still remember the sunny day, warm and bright, with the hills all golden from summer. The sky was blue, and the clouds were high and scattered. It got warm in the car, and I began to feel sleepy. I couldn't have been driving for more than twenty minutes, I think. Then my eyes got heavy, and I struggled to keep them open, but my blinks became longer, and longer. This is on a three lane freeway, mind, though I was in the furthest right one, thank goodness. I opened my eyes from one of the longest blinks to find I was about to run off the road and onto a shoulder. I swerved back into the lane, jolting my mother awake, and scaring the crap out of myself. I waveringly told my mother that she should probably drive, pulled over and swapped. I'm not sure to this day if she knows what exactly woke her up, because she never said anything, or questioned, and I didn't talk about it. The realization that I could have hurt her though, really frightened me. It's part of the reason that if I'm feeling sleepy, I will pull over and take a nap, no matter what. I fall asleep in cars. This is a simple fact of my existence. It's also why I dislike driving for longer than an hour. I invariably get sleepy. On the move to Washington, my poor uncle ended up driving most of it, because - and I kid you not - I basically slept the entire way. That's an 18 hour drive, if I remember correctly.

Anyhow. I learned my lesson about that early on, but really, just like my brother, it could have been so much worse. I'm thankful that in both cases, it wasn't.