Accidental early birds

Gentle readers in California latitudes (for I know that’s where all two or three of you live), do you know what time sunrise is up here these days? 5:21 a.m. And even though “sun” is just a theoretical construct that can only be assumed and not actually observed, it does result in the phenomenon of “light” — gray light, but light nonetheless — entering our bedroom at around 5:00 a.m. We’ve therefore been waking up at the very uncharacteristic hour of five in the morning. (My parents know how uncharacteristic this is for us; when we stay with them in San Diego they have to pretend that lunch is breakfast.) Usually we just toss about in denial, but this morning David actually got out of bed because he had to get to the airport to go to Boise to give a presentation for work. As I lay there not getting back to sleep, it occurred to me that I could just get up and prepare a lentil soup to cook in the Crock-Pot during the day, so that it would be ready to eat when David got back from Boise tonight.

So that’s what I did. I had to check the kitchen clock a few times to convince myself that, yes, I really was wide awake and sautéing an onion at five-thirty in the morning. If this trend of runaway productivity keeps up, I’ll have taken over the world by the summer solstice.

While it is nice to have natural light to wake up to, it would be better if it appeared when we were ready to get up, and not before. At least we’re not in Fairbanks; we do get more than eight hours of darkness, so falling asleep is not a problem. Then again, if we did live in Fairbanks, we’d probably just accept reality and tape black garbage bags over the window.