It’s 6, and I’ve been up for an hour, and it only just occurred to me that I should blog about this. Liza, awake before the butt-crack of dawn? On purpose?
The idea was that I would wake up an hour early today, and go for a walk before getting ready for work. (Ben would wake up early, too, but he doesn’t hate mornings as much as I do.) Now, “an hour early” is a variable thing, since I wake up anywhere from 7:30 to 8:30. But I figured 6:30 seems reasonable, until I remembered that the sun doesn’t rise until about 6:40, and we have a big ol’ hill that hides the risen sun for at least an hour. So, 6:45, then.
And I don’t keep an alarm clock, or any clock, in the bedroom. Which may explain my hour-long variation in typical waking-up time. So I moved a nice analog clock with a charming bell into the bedroom last night, even though it’s been losing time for quite a while. I reset it to “real” time last night, and set the alarm for 6:30. But while I was lying in bed I thought, wow this could go really wrong when that alarm doesn’t even try to wake me up until 9am. Not to mention that I can’t tell whether it knows the difference between AM and PM, or if it’ll just ding twice every day. If it does know the difference, it probably thinks it’s PM now, not AM, and so we extra won’t get an alarm.
In light of this clock-problem, last night as I was falling asleep I told myself to wake up around 6:30 or dawn, whichever seemed easier. (This often works for me, I just don’t usually bother. I mean, who would want to be awake then?*)
So this morning when I found myself awake, and it was dark out, I scrunched up my eyes to tell whether it was really dark out, or just nearly-dawn and getting lighter. (By the way, it’s just starting to get lighter now. Charming, really, like watching sunset in reverse. Huh.) The house across the street has rather bright lights, and just over the hill from us is a greenhouse that keeps lights on most of the time, and we have these huge dark pine trees behind the house that look pitch-black against even the night sky, and the moon might have even been out. So, there were lots of explanations for a light-colored sky that don’t involve it being nearly-dawn, but I was awake, so it must be close, right?
Wrong. It was 5. But I was already awake, and going back to sleep for an hour (or an hour-and-a-half, or two hours) would just make me not want to wake up again**. So I got up.
And I worked on my vampire story revisions. I’d had some pretty useful ideas as I was falling asleep last night (there’s something a bit disturbing, though, about falling asleep while thinking about a vampire story, even if I do know how it turns out), which I hadn’t gotten up to scribble down then because I was going to be waking up early and wanted to be rested.
It has yet to be seen whether this “walking” thing will be effective, or whether I’ll just be zonked all day. (And I still have half an hour before I’ll feel justified in making Ben wake up to keep me company.)
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* Aside from at least 3 of my favorite people, plus my father, who are all decided morning people. I don’t get it at all. It’s still night-time. I could be asleep.
** Not to mention that I suspect I’m allergic to our forced-air heat, and that part of my trouble with mornings has to do with the heater being on for an hour before I wake up. And at 5, the heater isn’t on yet. It’s on now of course.
