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Week in review: Week to 12 April
. I've been making a few changes to my daily routine, having identified a couple of factors that were messing with my ability to go to bed at a sensible hour. It's been working pretty well so far; I've been in bed within half an hour of my target time most days this week. There were even a strange couple of days where I was all ready to go to bed at least an hour earlier than the time I've been aiming at – only to find my brain insisting that it wasn't time for bed yet and finding things to do until I reached the target time.
. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)
. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.
. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.
. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.
. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.
. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)
. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.
. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.
. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.
. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.
no subject
If you are willing to talk about how you addressed the factors affecting going to bed it would be appreciated. I was doing well at the beginning of the year with absolute bloody mindedness, but there is only so long I can pull that kind of willpower in the evenings.
no subject
Here are some things I remember being helpful for me:
- Working on mornings as well as evenings: getting up early made it easier to go to bed early as well as vice versa. One thing I remember doing was to set a time in the morning (I think it was 5am or thereabouts) and if I woke up after that time for any reason I was Up and not allowed to go back to bed.
- Also, sticking my head outside the house at the first reasonable opportunity after getting up, to get some fresh air and demonstrate to my brain that the sun was up. I exist mostly indoors, so I needed to consciously create opportunities to observe things like "the sun is coming up" and "the sun is going down" and not just exist in a perpetual state of "the lights are on".
- At night, reining in the temptation to do just-one-thing before bed. One thing that really helped me, that's no longer specifically an option but there might be something comparable, is that when I started using Habitica to manage my to-do lists and habit-building, it had a hard limit at midnight, after which it would count me as having failed to do the thing that day even if I did it between midnight and going to bed. That made it a lot less tempting to stay up past midnight to get things done, and encouraged me to think ahead about things like "Does this need to be done this evening - in which case I should do it before midnight - or can it wait until the morning?" (It also helped that, once I started leaving things to the morning, I usually found that they went easier because my brain wasn't tired, which encouraged me to do more things in the morning.)
- Also, because my default method of killing time is to futz about on the computer, I installed a program (I used f.lux) that reduced the amount of blue light the computer screen emitted as the evening wore on. Blue light in the evenings is apparently supposed to keep you from getting sleepy, and I did find that after I installed the filter I was more likely to find myself getting sleepy at the computer and not just going along being square-eyed for hours on end.
- Before I got to the point where I wake up consistently in the morning without needing an alarm clock, I also found Sleepyti.me useful. It purports to help you set your alarm clock in tune with your sleep cycle, so that it will go off at a point when you're sleeping lightly and less likely to sleep through it. I'm not sure how solid the science behind it is (if nothing else, it's working off a theoretical average sleep cycle with no individual tuning), but it did seem to help.
no subject
This has been very helpful, much appreciated. The 'doing the morning pages in the morning' has been surprisingly helpful as a starting point. I've been using the laptop's built in 'make it orange' and I think that helps, although I am reminded (while writing this) that I was gifted a pair of orange glasses, which I should see whether they go over my actual glasses or not.
And I'm going to have to think about how I work with Habitica. Because 'half an hour before I plan to go to bed' is not the time to realise that I have an hour or so of little tasks not ticked off on Habitica, and that isn't great for doing things. Really doesn't help that I'm a night owl, attempting to become a morning person.
The 'not being allowed to go back to bed' is a good idea, and I'm going to have to work out how to apply that. I'm still in that 'not employed, relaxing' frame of mind that means I stay in bed and lounge / read / do the internet puzzles.
no subject
I'm not necessarily proof that this will work if you're properly a night owl: when I started working on my sleep patterns, I was staying up very late and sleeping through multiple alarms in the morning, but I had reason to suspect that I was really a morning person with time management problems. (The thing I remember motivating me was realising that I always woke up early with no effort when I was on holiday, which didn't seem like night owl behaviour.)