Taking A Different Tack

First off, is it "a different tack" or "a different tact?" I've heard it used both ways, but of course that doesn't prove anything. "Irregardless" isn't a word, no matter how many people use it in their daily life. "For all intensive purposes" is still a mash-up of the proper "for all intents and purposes", and makes little sense, to boot. For this one, I'm pretty confident it's "tack", not "tact", as I think it comes from the world of sailing where "tack" refers to the heading a ship follows, and so taking a different tack means going in another direction.

Which is what this is about. I've been waking up in the middle of the night a lot lately, almost always thinking about work. This comes after an extended period of feeling better about my job, so I thought I had a better grip on things than to have this happen. But apparently I'm only managing to suppress my office demons long enough to let them bubble back up when I'm trying to sleep. Oh joy.

Yesterday I thought I'd change things up a bit. Unlike pretty much any other evening in the last.. oh, several years, I didn't read my work e-mail at all once I got home. I've been so completely in the habit of doing that several times a night, and repeatedly over the weekend, that I almost do it reflexively. But with all that's going on these days, those little ventures back into Office Land have probably been responsible for keeping me from letting work go during my valuable down time.

And wouldn't you know, I slept great last night! I was asleep from before midnight until sometime after 7:00 am, which normally would require heavy medication or a previous all-nighter to make happen. I woke up refreshed and didn't even think about the job until I was getting dressed, which again is unusual because normally I'd have checked e-mail before then. Obviously it's too early to make any bold claims yet, but the results were promising enough that I'm repeating the experiment tonight. We'll see what tonight brings.