Salon post : January 19

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post. I get us started with a couple of questions, but feel free to bring up totally different things if you'd rather.

(This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.)

Topics of the week:
Wow, I'm glad it's Friday. Too much tired in the end of my week.

I sent out my fortnightly newsletter this Wednesday and one of the things I linked to was a site collecting brief interviews with people's morning routines, um, few of which remotely resemble mine, but which are interesting to peer at.

So I'm curious what yours are, and whether it's a thing you like, or a thing that is 'doing this because it's necessary'. And if you're so inclined, what your ideal might be. (I'll do my own in a comment.)

Recent things I've been doing:
Currently up to Trial of a Timelord in my Doctor Who rewatch, and reading a book about the Black Death, Return of the Black Death by Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, which argues that the Black Death was a viral infection (more similar to Ebola) than rat/flea Bubonic Plague.

I'm only a couple of chapters in, so still contemplating the argument, but there's a bunch of interesting data and quotes from writers at the time. (Some of which I've read before, because I am that kind of person, but some of which are new to me.)

I am also contemplating what I want to offer and request in the Worldbuilding Exchange, a fanfic exchange focusing on (shock!) worldbuilding. I had a lot of fun writing for it last year (Pseudonyms are Expected, a Leverage thing about an email list) (commentary here), and I liked a lot of other things people wrote too.


House rules:
* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.

* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[davidgillon]

The morning routine my body seems to tolerate most reliably barely qualifies as a morning routine, as it involves waking about 11AM. Depending on how I've slept*, it can take me two or three attempts at waking up and I can be seriously groggy for a couple of hours, or I can wake up first time - it's very variable.

I'll usually grab my Kindle Fire from next to the bed before thinking about moving (I'm not always particularly mobile first thing). That might be half an hour playing a game, or catching up on Dreamwidth, or reading whatever I'm currently reading, or a combination.

At some point in there I'll stumble out of bed and deal with the necessities. Sometimes I'll put coffee on, but mostly not at the moment.

And eventually I'll be both awake and mobile, and getting up and getting dressed becomes feasible.

I'll sometime have a more conventional schedule during the summer, but it's rare that I can stick to it for more than a fortnight or so.

* It's reasonably common for me not to get to sleep until 6AM or even 8AM, with 4AM being my rough normal. I'm so not a morning person.

[jenett]

I really liked the bit when my job hours were either 1pm to 11pm or 11am to 8pm.

It had complexities for other reasons, and it turned out to be tricky to do writing time because I'd resist getting started if I knew I'd need to go to bed or work soon) but the sleep was fantastic. I'd come home, putter for 2-3 hours, go to bed, and wake up 8 hours later.

[rosefox]

Woo, delayed sleep phase syndrome high five! It's interesting that you go to bed earlier in the summer; I often stay up until dawn. Going to bed "on time" (~2 a.m.) is much easier in the winter when I haven't had all that sunlight to wire me up.

My wake-up routine is pretty much the same regardless of timing, though. If I have a thing I have to get to, I stay in bed until about 10 minutes past the "must get up by this time or I will be late" cut-off, panic, skip showering and eating, jump into clothes, head out the door. If I don't have a thing, I doze until I am incontrovertibly awake, then meander into shower and food and clothes and so forth.

One unexpected side effect of having been on the wrong schedule for 25 years is that I can't eat until I've been awake for at least half an hour, because I get really queasy when I wake up much earlier than my body clock wants to, and even now that I'm able to keep a mostly natural-feeling schedule, my stomach is always a bit wary when I get up.

[davidgillon]

It's interesting that you go to bed earlier in the summer; I often stay up until dawn.

I've taken to sleeping in the bedroom the morning sun hits during the summer. And as I often leave the curtains open that means sun shining right on me. But inevitably I'll eventually fail to get to sleep one night, and revert to later morning waking.

My last boss had the habit of getting into work ridiculously early, whereas I'd pushed my flexible start back to 9:30, so the joke was that I wasn't getting to sleep until after she had started work (except it was true, not a joke). It worked well in that it meant I was there to cover stuff from our American colleagues after she'd gone home.