December 30, 2015

6 blog posts by 6:15 this morning.

I'm just telling you this because I'm afraid you won't notice all the new material, including one post about what I googled at 2:30 a.m.: "Does Donald Trump sleep?"

15 comments:

traditionalguy said...

We early risers need some rest now. This definitely is not a low energy Blog.

Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...

I notice, because it's a rare morning I'm up much past 05:00. You are probably similar.

Greek Donkey said...

Are in London?

Ann Althouse said...

Getting up early is a good way to deal with the very short days. Since I blog first thing in the morning, if I got up at 7:30, I'd be spending a valuable part of the day — the sunlit part — doing something that can be done pretty well in the dark. You have to get over the weird feeling of being up for hours without light. Like, right now, I've been up for more than 4 hours and there's another hour of darkness to go! That might make me groggy... or crazy. But so far, I feel all right.

We have the full light part of the day to be out and about. It already getting dark at 4 p.m., so we tend to be winding down then. We eat our last food of the day not long after that, and then we read or watch TV. That's going to result in a very early bedtime. That means, when you wake up and look at the clock and it's 3, you feel that it makes sense to get up. But 2:30... that was a little hard to believe.

Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...

Hey, I used to live in the Arctic for several years, where in winter we got to see the sun for about 45 minutes per day. Don't fret it. You get used to doing lots of stuff in the dark.

Tank said...

When I wake up at 3 AM I never think "it makes sense to get up," except when I'm going on vacation, in which case I usually wake up at 3 AM even if it's not at all necessary. Travel !

What I almost always think if I'm awake at 3 AM is: "I have to pee."

Ann Althouse said...

"Hey, I used to live in the Arctic for several years..."

What were you doing?

Ann Althouse said...

"When I wake up at 3 AM I never think "it makes sense to get up," except when I'm going on vacation, in which case I usually wake up at 3 AM even if it's not at all necessary. Travel !"

When we're on car trips, we love to wake up at 3 and get into the car. You can get some of the best driving done before dawn, and it's fun to watch the light come up, especially when it's in the rear view mirror.

Curious George said...

"... it's fun to watch the light come up,..."

I like to fish during these times. It's fun to watch the lake and all the nature wake up.

rhhardin said...

I get up at 2:30 on days when the dog has requested a trip outside, stay up for a while and then go back to bed.

3:30 or so was a good time to take a long-route bike trip to Kroger, often seeing not a single car, past ghostly cows and star-lit roads, but Kroger queered that by closing at 1am instead of staying open all night, depriving me of a destination.

rhhardin said...

All my Ohio/NJ road trips in the 90s began at 1am.

RAH said...

Hate to say that I read your Trump post around 4 am since I wake up generally in the night. I usually wake at 2 am and go back to sllep about 2 hr later and get up at 5 am

mikee said...

I either need to stop drinking liquids after 9:00pm, or have my prostate checked, because I get up about every two hours each night to empty my bladder. Getting older really has little to recommend it, except when I consider the alternative.

Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...

BART: "Hey, I used to live in the Arctic for several years..."

ANN: What were you doing?

Primarily I was teaching sciences and history in a residential high school. The settlements are too small and too far apart ever to have a high school, so the kids all go to a regional high school where they live for the year. Ours had almost 100 students, grades 9 through 12.

On the side I was growing vegetables for the kitchen, along with producing eggs and goat-milk so that we'd have some fresh things difficult to bring in from "outside". Each year the biology class would survey the caribou herd, determine how many could be harvested for the larder and choose which ones were best harvested to improve the herd. Grade 9/10 Biology. Fantastically practical and relevant to their future lives in that part of the world.

I had the Grade 10/11 chemistry class determine oxygen levels in several small lakes in which we raised rainbow trout. It was essential that oxygen levels go to zero over winter, or else the next year there would be about three very large trout and nothing else. The biology students gill-netted out the trout, counting populations and weight to determine total biological productivity for the season.

Much more I could say, but you get the picture. They were excellent years, and quite challenging for a young man then in his mid-20s. I abandoned my first doctorate as an ABD to move north and teach those kids, about half of whom were amerindians of one sort or another.

Ann Althouse said...

That sounds like a wonderful experience, Bart.