3493 Early bird

Thursday, March 22, 2012

If you want to be seen, stand up.
If you want to be heard, speak up.
If you want to be appreciated, shut up.

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Prior to moving here, for the past nine years or so I had gone to bed after the evening news, somewhere between 11:30 pm and midnight, read or worked some puzzles or watched TV in bed, and fell asleep an hour or two later. I'd wake after 9 am, sometimes 10 if it had been a good book.

Here, I'm dragging by 9 pm, asleep by 11, and wide awake usually around 6:30 am. I don't use an alarm clock, but it's pretty much the same time every day. It's still dark out.

I didn't understand why. I am not a morning person, so it makes no sense.

Today I woke at 5:30 am to get some aspirin because I had a headache, and now I think I know why the early waking.

At the old house my neighbors were at some distance. Here they're right on top of me.

The guy across the street has a remote car starter. He starts the car at 5:40, and then it sits there running for 15 minutes, with the tail lights flashing red on my bedroom windows. And either it's just a deep-throated car, or he's got a muffler problem. He leaves a hair before 6.

Then at 6:15, the short school bus arrives to pick up my neighbor, who rides that bus to care for the kids who need assistance. The bus turns around in the driveway across the street, and it BEEP BEEP BEEPs when it backs up.

The birds are in full throat by then. There are a lot more birds here than at the old house. The old house was on a ridge above farmland to the west, where they grow corn, wheat, and several kinds of berries, and it's all woods around the house to the south, east, and north. The majority of the birds are in the woods or in the fields, away from the house.

Here, Daughter has two huge white pines in her front yard, with about 12 bird houses (some are bird apartments), there's a small lake behind my house, and at the end of the block there's the bay. Screaming seagulls, honking geese, chirping songbirds. Those damn things are LOUD!

So the idling car pulls me out of deep sleep, the beeping bus pulls me to awareness, and the birds don't let me fall back. By 6:30 I'm fully awake.

I figure the being so tired by 9 or 10 pm is due to early awakening, pollution, and boredom.

I liked my old schedule better.
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