I came to an astonishing realization on Saturday.
You may want to be sitting down when I reveal it.
Is everyone seated?
Good.
Waking up at 1 a.m. and thinking for a few seconds that it is 4 a.m. can mess up your day pretty quick.
You see, I normally am up at 4 a.m. to go in to CFIS and do the weather (which updates at 5) and the morning Citizen. I don’t really NEED to be in that early, but I like to be so I can get things done without feeling rushed.
Normally, I only have to be in that early on weekdays, but this past week I was also doing it Saturday and Sunday, so when I went to bed Friday night, I made sure my clock radio alarm was still set for 4 a.m.
And then I went to sleep.
I woke up, looked at my radio and could have sworn it said it was 3:50, so I figured I may as well get up rather than try to get any more sleep in the 10 minutes I had before the alarm went off.
I got up, slipped on my slippers and started to head out to the kitchen to grab a bite to eat.
Then I realized I should probably turn my radio alarm off so it wouldn’t go off for no reason. I have never heard from anyone else in the apartment building about my alarm waking them up at 4 a.m., but there’s always a first time.
As I bent down to turn the alarm off, I got a closer look at the time.
12:58 a.m.
Had I realized that a few minutes earlier, before I got out of bed and was now semi-awake, I would have just rolled over, closed my eyes and tried to get some more sleep, knowing I had three hours before the alarm would actually go off.
Unfortunately, I was just awake enough to know I would not be able to get t\back to sleep quickly, which meant I would get substantially less than three hours more rest, so I decided to get a few things done.
What I then realized was that there isn’t much going on at 1 a.m. I had a bite to eat, then turned my computer on.
Surprise, surprise. All the sporting events that I had seen final scores for the night before hadn’t changed, so there wasn’t much to do there.
I played games for a few minutes, but being only about half-awake was not helping my performance. (It also wasn’t hurting it all that much, because I’m not that good at the game to start with.)
Eventually I went back to bed and got a bit more sleep.
The next time I woke up, I focused more on the clock and made sure it was 3:48 before I got up.
It was not a great way to start the day.