morning is a strange time of day

[fox]

Two nights ago, I set the alarm for the new-improved Earlier Time, intending to go to the gym before having a day. (I used to do this! ... when it was downstairs in my own building. Now it's down the block, but probably about the same distance door to door. No excuse, really -- not even the fact that it's cold outside and I have to cross the street.) I then woke up around 2am with one of those flashes of inspiration that sometimes jar you awake at the least convenient times, lay there for a while trying to get back to sleep, and finally did, only to wake up at more or less the old Usual Time when it turned out I had once again failed to actually turn the alarm on after setting it. Went to the gym anyway, got to work about 9:10, no biggie.

Last night I did set the alarm correctly, and this morning I got up, and went over to the gym, and have now showered and dressed and had breakfast, and it's still close to an hour before I have to leave the house. I may have miscalculated in there somewhere. :-)

Whenever I'm up this early (I've got a sunrise in one living-room window and still a kind of shadowy dawn in the other) I think the morning people may be onto something. I never do manage to sustain it, though. It'd be a lot easier to appreciate the morning if you didn't have to miss so much of the nighttime to see it properly.