Have you ever wondered where some of our sayings come from? Like, "Burning the midnight oil", for example. Everyone knows the obvious answer of staying up late into the night, but where did this saying come from, besides that boring answer of "from the days of oil lamps". Did they have a special oil that they saved up to be burned only at midnight? Say, for example, the stinky oil that wouldn't bother as many people when more of them were awake?
Burning the midnight oil... It's what I did last night, and today I was so tired that I could barely hold my head up in church, which wasn't a good thing. You see, the stake president was speaking, and as I jerked my head forward from it's backwards falling position, eyes suddenly wide open, I was met by the gaze of our stake president... who is new, I might add, and considerably younger than myself (ergo, not as tired...). He looked a bit unnerved that someone would be falling asleep during his illustrious talk. It WAS a good talk... I think... I just couldn't hold my head up any longer.
At that point, I vowed I would take a nap as soon as I got home. I didn't think I would make it to the end of the 3 hour block, but then came nursery and all the snacks kind of revived me. You've got to love working in the nursery. Where else in the church, do you get to skip to RS while eating snacks and playing with toys for 2 hours? But nursery is a whole other blog... this one is about burning the candle at both ends... or burning up in hot flashes... or... where was I?
Oh yeah, I was so tired this morning, I forgot to take my purse. I discovered this... while driving to church... without my license... when I couldn't find my sunglasses, or my reading glasses, my handkerchief, my chap stick, or any of the rest of my universe... which then required someone else to drive my car home for me.
I was so tired... I fantasized about the nap I was going to take all the way home. I even debated whether I should eat lunch or just go straight to bed. Lunch won out... and then I remembered that I needed to write to Barry before it got forgotten and my poor missionary son would be the only elder in Fresno not to get a Monday email from home. .. which, sadly, has happened before.
Well, the email got too long, requiring a snail mail for the too bulky part... which, of course, required several pictures to be printed out... which required downloads from the camera, transfers into Adobe, edits and then the excruciatingly long process of transferring them to a printable format with my broken computer... Needless to say, 5 hours later, as I was putting the stamp on the envelope, I realized that I had passed nap time completely. Not only that, it was dinner time, and the horses needed to be grained... and then the burrs needed to be picked out of their manes... and then, well, we just "needed" to play with them a little...
Finally, I vowed to go to bed EARLY! 8pm, at the very latest.
Enter Family Home Evening. Kam's birthday party is tomorrow and we had some serious preparations to make. We made up a "lesson", of sorts, and then set to work getting the house ready for the party as a fhe "activity". Lame. To make up for the lameness, we next decided to play a game... at 8:10pm.
Dang, now I was officially late for bed... even if I did win the game... around 9:40 pm... then I realized I still had 2 presents to wrap... enter 10pm ... and a shower to take... and 4 chapters of Ether to read... and blah, blah, blah.
So, burning the midnight oil... what is it truly all about? Why is it so hard to do a simple thing like get to bed on time? Tonight, at midnight... I will read Ether by the light of my oil lamp... and figure it all out!
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