One of the attractions of retirement is mostly living on your own schedule. Not totally, of course. Things like medical appointments, which typically go hand in hand with retirement, happen during specific hours. (Unless you're desperate and go to the emergency ward at the hospital.) The stores are only open during specific hours. The pool I swim at has lane swimming only during certain, but somewhat erratic hours, which makes planning a bit difficult sometimes.
But overall that still gives lots of space for custom tuned times for going to bed or getting out of it. Except part of the retirement thing, at least for me, is erratic sleep patterns. I'm sure that some of it stems from working shift work way back in the 80's. Before then I was a night owl. During, I was all messed up, never quite knowing if I was asleep or awake. One of the last straws was coming home after night shift and pulling in to watch a balloon being inflated in the LRT parking lot. I never saw it go up. I fell asleep and didn't wake up till about 11am. Poor Linda was (quite justifiably) freaked out. She was expecting the cops to come to the door to tell her I'd been a car collision.
That, plus the demonstrated failures of memory was when I started planning to change jobs. After I got off shift work it took most of a year to get my sleep patterns settled down again, and then it turned out I was a morning person. Which made getting up to go to work, and even get swim workouts done before work possible.
But there's times now that something will wake me up in the early hours of the morning. Like 2am, just as one example. Sometimes I'll just lie there, thinking about various things, hoping to go back to sleep. Sometimes that happens, much later. Or I'll doze, half asleep, half awake, which probably isn't good.
Every now and then I've got up, thinking I'm awake I might as well work on a project. Except usually I find out I'm not as awake as I thought I was, and Celina will assume it's time to be fed, encouraging me with her air raid siren level meow. She doesn't like it when I tell her to howl louder because the cats on Mars can't hear her.
Plus, Linda will be asleep, or trying to sleep, so that limits how much noise I can make. She has basically two modes of "sleep". One is right out of it. We could hold a bagpipe marching band competition in the bedroom and she wouldn't notice. The other is the opposite. Me breathing, or Celina walking around, is much too loud.
Today is an example. I was up way before sunrise. Awake. I got up and did the daily puzzles, (Wordle in 4, if you're interested, which is par for me.) before coffee, even. I was thinking the sunrise might be nice, so I was keeping an eye on that during coffee and breakfast. I actually dressed and went out with the camera! It wasn't spectacular, but neither did I freeze anything off.
It's warmed up even more since then, reaching the magical Mercer +1C! I think I'll dig my way to the barbecue and fire it up for the first time this year. It's been so cold I'm not even sure I'd have been able to light it. Propane is a liquid at -40 C or so.
I still have a few frames in the film camera to finish the roll. I was wary of taking it out in the really cold weather. I'm afraid the film would be so brittle it would crack. I can't find reliable data saying when that would happen. The other problem when it's cold and dry is the potential of static sparks as the film is wound and rewound.
The sunrise view from our kitchen during the cold weather.
This morning's sunrise, plus two serendipity images.
Coming back to the house after stalking the sunrise this morning. This is what it looks like after several weeks of brutally cold minus WTF weather.
Of the Day
Driftwood (NZ)
Driftwood (BC)
Yukon
Film (new)
Film (old)
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