Actually, I think I am a morning person. Left to my own devices, I wake up around 6 am (or sometime between 4:30 and 5 if I "know" I have to be up by five and have the alarm set). And I do my best work in the morning.
But I would prefer my mornings to be a bit more civilized.. I'd like to be able to take time to eat a proper breakfast rather than swallow a bowl of cereal while "telling" the local news show to stop showing that fluff on "relationships" and "gardening" and get to the weather instead.
I'd like to be able to see the sun rise before I left my house for the day.
As it is, I get up sometime between 4:30 and 5. Put on the workout clothes, spend an hour on the cross-country ski exerciser. Then I wash up and dress (and some days it takes longer than others if I keep pulling out and rejecting outfits). Then I must make my lunch for the day (which is why I wind up with rather uninspiring lunches; if you were packing a lunch at 6:20 when you're really not hungry after having worked out for an hour, you'd probably pack the same thing every day...whatever is easiest to grab). Then I eat breakfast, watch a little local news (one of the local news shows has two female anchors in the morning and I honestly expect one of these days I'm going to get to see an on-air cat fight). Then I brush my teeth, do the breakfast "dishes" (such as they are: a juice glass and a cereal bowl and spoon) and then gather up what I need for the day and head out.
It would be NICE if I could take 15 minutes and, I don't know, sit at the quilting frame a bit. Or flip through a magazine. But usually it doesn't work that way and one thing I do notice is that I make all these plans while I'm on the exerciser (well, you have to do SOMETHING with your brain so it doesn't totally rebel) and have this big list of what I'd like to do for the day, but often it kind of drains out of me between washing the breakfast dishes and getting out of my car over at school.
And I blame the fact that I feel like I'm driving in in the middle of the night. And I blame the fact that there has been more than one time I've arrived at work with my heart in my throat because some very clever person out on the road seems to think that not using their headlights is a way to conserve gas.
As I said, I'd like an extra 15 minutes or so to do something that reminds me I'm not a mere automaton, but I'll be d....d if I set my alarm for 15 minutes earlier just so I can do it. (And the other things are non-negotiable. Packing a lunch the night before didn't work, usually because I forget to do it (and some evenings are even busier than mornings). I need the full time I use to wash and dress after working out. Setting clothes out the night before works SOMETIMES, provided the weather forecast wasn't horribly off)
And while being on Standard Time doesn't really change any of that, still, there's something I find fundamentally more hopeful about driving in as the sun is coming up rather than before.
3 comments:
Funny, almost every morning I too feel the day will offer so much potential and am briefly excited. But then life/chores/commitments rapidly intervene and I am left with the same old day as yesterday...Guess that's why vacations are so precious to us, especially if you can get away.
-- Grace in MA
What makes a "morning person" is not how early they get up (as I'm sure you know) but which end of the day they have more energy.
I actually would mind driving to work as the sun is coming up much less if it weren't for the fact that my office is east of my home, so I get the sun in my face both coming and going. OTOH, I commute in the direction opposite from the heaviest traffic, so I don't complain too much.
I discovered when I moved out here that it's rather a different experience being at the far western edge of a large time zone, rather than the eastern edge of one. It stays dark in the morning here nearly an hour later than I was used to, but when I visit my old home now in midwinter, I'm always startled when it's pitch black at 4:00pm -- I'm not used to that any more. The real kicker was in the 1970s when we had year-round Daylight Savings Time for a couple of years and it was still dark at 8:00am out here in the winter!
I'm a morning person too—and even though I'm retired and don't *have* to do anything in the morning other than feed the cats, I like to get up early (ideally by five or so) and spend an hour (and a couple of cups of tea) checking things on the computer and getting my mental ducks in a row. It makes the rest of my day so much smoother. (And I detest DST, too—it simply isn't supposed to be still dark at 7 a.m.)
My husband, on the other hand, is definitely a night person (especially after working third shift for twenty-some years): he prefers to sleep until ten or eleven, and rarely goes to bed before three a.m. even now, after being retired for three years.
So we have some interesting schedules . . . but at least there's almost always someone up to feed the woodstove!
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