pedanther | Entries tagged with good morning

. 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.

This week I made a change to how I do journal entries on 750 Words: instead of writing each entry at night, last thing before going to bed, I wrote each entry in the morning, first thing after getting up. It wasn't a considered decision: I was worn out after a particularly long, hot day, and was struggling to stay awake let alone string words together, so I logged that day as a vacation day and did the entry in the morning when I was more rested. And then, since getting back on track would have meant writing two whole diary entries of several thousand words each in a single day, I just kept doing the previous day's entry each morning. I'm not sure I'm happy with this way of doing it; partly I'm worried that leaving it until after I've slept means I forget things, but mostly it's that first thing in the morning is my good time for getting things done, and if I spend a chunk of it on the journal entry that's less time and getting-done-ness left for the morning exercise and anything else that needs doing. But it is nice being able to decide that it's time to go to bed and then go to bed, without having to wrangle words for an hour first.

(If I really work at it, I may even be able to regularly get to bed at a reasonable time and then get up early enough to get a lot of things done.)

On the public holiday, the board gaming club had one of its long afternoon sessions where people bring out games that are too long to play in the evenings. On this occasion, we played Eclipse, a game involving exploring the galaxy and gathering resources and moving a number of little cubes around on a player mat. I often get frustrated with games that are built around moving a number of little cubes around on a player mat, but I quite enjoyed this one, and even wouldn't mind playing it again at some point, though I don't know when I'm likely ever to have the time.

Afterward, as a shorter, more relaxing game to finish on, we played Fabled Fruits, which is a fun game that's slightly different every time you play, because it comes with a large deck of game mechanics and every time someone scores a point there's a chance of a new mechanic being added or an old mechanic being removed. I won the game, partly because another player who was vigilantly blocking all my opportunities to score the winning point got thrown by the last-minute introduction of a new rule that gave me an opportunity he overlooked.

Apart from the timed reading challenges on StoryGraph, like the monthly challenges I do, there are untimed ones that can be more for keeping track of things like how many different countries or how many years of publication you've read books from. I signed up to a "Read a book from every country" challenge a while back, and this week I added a "Read a book from every year since 1800", which took quite a while to fill in all the years I've already achieved. I can therefore report that I have read books from 9.6% of countries (all the usual English-speaking or Classical culprits, plus a few outliers like Denmark and Kenya), and that I have read books from 71.9% of the years since 1800, with 1896 being the most recent year from which I have not yet read a book.

In XCOM 2, I've got up to the final mission. I reached it late in the evening, so I saved the game and stopped there so I could come at it fresh when I had more time. That was several days ago, and I've never felt any urge to get around to it. I already know I can do the final mission; it's the complicated process of getting that far that was the interesting challenge.

1. There are 18 novels and a bit over twice that many short stories set in the Liaden Universe, and yesterday I finished reading through them all one after the other. It took me a bit over two years, although that's mainly because I was blogging each chapter or story as I read it, which meant I couldn't read the next one until I'd thought of something to say. Without that restriction, I'd have got through them much quicker, but then I'd have probably missed a lot of things I noticed on this re-read.

2. Rehearsals have begun for the Christmas Show. I was nervous before the first rehearsal - I was running it alone because my co-runner couldn't make it, and although I'd only called half the cast that still meant more actors than every play I've directed before now put together - but it seemed to go all right. And seeing them moving around the stage helped me figure out what the set should look like in the first scene. (Note to self: Draw a diagram of that.)

3. I seem to have become a morning person now. I'm regularly waking up a couple of hours before work (or the equivalent time on weekends) without any artificial assistance, and regularly feeling sleepy and going to bed about eight hours before that. I do wonder if it has anything to do with spring and the sun coming up earlier; it'll be interesting to see what happens when the days start getting shorter again.

4. I haven't mentioned Doctor Who Legacy in while; not since I reached the end of the first "season" and concluded that it still didn't have anything resembling a plot. In fairness, therefore, I should note that it does develop an actual plot toward the end of the second "season", though the connection between the story elements and the actual gameplay remains tenuous to non-existent.

5. My new favourite podcast is I Was There Too, which explores the world of movie-making through the perspectives of people who had tiny roles in big movies. Guests have included the first marine to die in Aliens, the woman with the baby carriage in The Untouchables, the Apple Store clerk in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and, in a special group interview, all those other people on the bus in Speed.

I am getting better at getting out of bed at a reasonable time in the morning. There are multiple reasons for this, obviously, but a big one is that I'm also getting better at getting into bed at a relatively reasonable time at night.

Signing up for HabitRPG has been a big help with this, in a way separate from the reminders and rewards by which it is designed to help. (Though of course I'm using the reminders and rewards as well.) The thing is, the application inherently has a deadline: if you don't get a thing done before the calendar rolls over at midnight, it gets counted against you as an incomplete for the day, even if you do it afterward. And this acts as a counter to my previous tendency to say "I'll just get this one more thing done today" until, several one-more-things later, it's ridiculous o'clock in the morning. It's much easier, now, to tell myself "It's too late to do this thing now, I might as well go to bed and do it in the morning", especially since I can now be confident I'll actually get up in the morning in time to do things before work.

(Sometimes, of course, there's a thing that really does need to be done before I go to bed, but the deadline is also leading me to be a bit better at prioritising so I can get things like that done before midnight, and not procrastinate until they can only be finished by staying up until ridiculous o'clock.)

1. This weekend is the final weekend before the season of short plays opens. Today was the tech rehearsal, where we nailed down the lighting and sound effects. There's something about seeing the play properly lit for the first time that makes it seem real in a way it didn't before.

Or maybe it's just relief; there were times when I wasn't sure the lighting was going to come together. As it was, we ended up throwing out one of my ideas because it just plain wasn't going to work. (Fortunately, it was a bonus subtlety, not a key detail, and I wasn't all that attached to it.)

Actually, during the first run through the lighting cues, there was a second idea that wasn't going to work, so I threw it out too, and we moved on. Then, some time later, after we'd gone on to other things, the lighting guy wandered past and asked a question about it, and then a few minutes later he wandered past again and said, "How about if we...?" And we tried it, and it wasn't what I'd imagined, but it did the job even better than what I'd imagined would have done if it had worked. One of the things I love about working in theatre is the collaborative aspect, especially when it means somebody comes up with a better idea than I did.

2. This week, Mark Oshiro reached a new high-water-mark in unpreparedness at Mark Reads. One of the things that makes it so entertaining when Mark is working his way through a new novel is that not only does he not know what's coming in the sense that he's never read the novel before, but he also doesn't have the kind of mind that retains and assembles clues to predict future plot twists. The plot twists always take him by surprise.

But he's surpassed himself this time. He's currently reading Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards!, which has a plot revolving around a detective on the trail of a sinister conspiracy led by a shadowy anonymous figure. He didn't pick up on any of the hints that might lead a genre-savvy reader to guess the villain's identity in advance, but that's normal for Mark. He didn't put it together after reading the scene in which the detective figures it out, which is okay because it's not spelled out for the reader in that scene. But then he went on and read the scene in which the detective goes and confronts the villain and he still doesn't know who the villain is.

3. Last week was the local round of the annual Toastmasters speech evaluation contest, which I always enter, even though I never win, because it's valuable practice and a good way to sharpen a useful skill set.

This year I won.

4. Two weeks ago, I finished reading The Lost Prince, one of the lesser-known works by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. It was... kind of weird, for a number of reasons, and something of a disappointment after the two novels aforementioned. It hasn't aged well on things like classism and sexism, and I'm not inclined to give it a pass on anything like "of its time" grounds because it was written after The Secret Garden, so we know the author could pass the Bechdel test and write working-class characters as actual human beings if she wanted to. (It should perhaps be noted, to be complete, that some of the upper-class characters in The Lost Prince don't quite convince as real people, either; class essentialism cuts both ways. I was amused and not entirely surprised to subsequently discover that a significant proportion of the Lost Prince fic on AO3 is crackfic in which the Lost Prince's bloodline literally isn't entirely human.)

5. Three weeks ago, I signed up for HabitRPG, which aims to make getting stuff done more interesting by supplying a RPG-themed context: strengthen a good habit or tick off something on your to-do list, and your character gains XP and loot; strengthen a bad habit, and your character loses health points. It probably says something about my habits that most of my loot has been going toward armour and health potions to stave off the effects of my bad habits, but I have been seeing some improvement, and noticing moments when I've gained the necessary willpower get something done or avoid a bad habit by remembering what will happen to fictional-me if I don't. One area where I feel I've made definite improvement is in the area of getting to bed at a reasonable time; even when I fail to get to bed by the self-imposed deadline that would win me loot, it's usually not by much, and I don't do the noodling-around-on-the-internet-until-ridiculous-o'clock thing nearly as often. It's having a knock-on effect on how easily I get out of bed in the morning, too.

1. Spring is here, spring is here. The days are long enough again that I'm waking up in time to get ready for work without rushing and sunglasses are useful walking home, and in between it's too warm to keep wearing a jacket (which annoyingly leaves me short of several useful pockets).

2. At the beginning of September, my Liaden Universe re-read will hit Agent of Change, the novel which began it all. (Yes, slightly over a year in. There have been a lot of prequels since then.) I feel I should mention that it's a convenient jumping-on point, being by necessity written for an audience unfamiliar with the universe and the characters, and the e-book edition is part of the Baen Free Library. The man who was not Terrence O'Grady had come quietly...

3. Speaking of e-book editions of books I would be pressing on all my friends if I were the kind of person who did that, there's an introductory price offer going on the first two volumes of Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series. (The link goes to Amazon, but they're also available in the other places e-books are usually found.) Not being, as I mentioned, constitutionally inclined to explaining to people how much I loved books, I'm going to let Jo Walton and James Nicoll do it for me. (James's post goes into more detail than Jo's, but is less safe for the spoilerphobe, and this is one series where finding out too much in advance can squash the fun of discovering it for yourself.)

4. It's a sign of how much side- and bonus content is packed into Lego Marvel Super Heroes that when I finished the main storyline a month ago, the counter showing how much of the game I'd played stood at a bit less than 25%. It's now up around 75%; I've finished the bonus episodes and most of the random bystander sidequests, and been through the storyline again in Free Play mode to try and pick up the bonus points that aren't accessible in Story Mode. (Free Play lets you choose which character you play as, and change your mind whenever you like, instead of being stuck with the characters the story gives you, and thereby reach places and solve puzzles the story characters can't. When I'm not facing a puzzle that requires a particular character's special abilities, my two default characters in Free Play are Iron Man, for efficient property damage, and Squirrel Girl, for her special way of dealing with hordes of attacking mooks.)

The remaining content is mostly in two areas that don't particularly appeal to me. The first is there are still bonus points eluding me in some of the story episodes, and I don't feel like playing through again to get them, at least not yet. (Finishing the bonus episodes was supposed to unlock a set of abilities that would make finding the bonus points easier, but I have to say that I haven't noticed them make any difference whatever.) The second thing is that I haven't done most of the aerial races/obstacle courses, and don't intend to. (I didn't intend to do many of the road races either, but once I'd got the hang of the controls it turned out to be a lot of fun zooming through the city and ploughing through innocent scenery at high speed; however, there's no scenery in the sky and the flight controls are even more annoying than the driving controls.)

5. There were things I liked and things I didn't like about "Deep Breath", the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who. The new Doctor, as played by Peter Capaldi, was definitely one of the things I liked. I was less keen on Clara's arc, which struck me as a case of Steven Moffat coming up with an interesting story about a companion reacting to the Doctor's regeneration (okay so far) and deciding to use it regardless of whether it actually fit the current companion (I'm having trouble thinking of any companion less likely than Clara to react that way, and it doesn't help that the same episode contains several reminders of why). The blatant Here Be This Season's Mystery bit at the end of the episode completely failed to engage my interest, but I guess I'll put up with it for more Capaldi.

1. The season of one-act plays opens tomorrow, and my first attempt at directing will be exposed to a paying audience. I'm not worried; the play's come together really well, it got a good response from the people who saw it at the dress rehearsals, and in the unlikely event that the proper audience is less appreciative I have Oscar Wilde's bon mot ready to hand.

The fact that I'm not worried didn't stop me having the usual between-final-rehearsal-and-opening-night-mare last night. Interestingly, it was the usual "on stage and forgotten my part" version, even though I'm directing and not acting this time; I suppose since I've never directed before, my unconscious doesn't have any raw material to craft an appropriate horror out of.

2. The annual performing arts festival was last weekend. (The music section; the drama section will be in a few weeks, after the one-acts are done with.) What with one thing and another, including rehearsals for the one-acts, I didn't make it to any of the sessions except the one in which I played in the brass band. I didn't even stick around long enough after we played to find out the results, but I expect we did as well as we usually do. I completely missed the Character Vocal section, which is the bit I look forward to all year. According to the programme, that means I missed out on someone in the under-14 division attempting my solo number from Chicago; I have no idea whether that's something to regret or be thankful for. I also note the unusual fact that nobody sang "A Whole New World", "Beauty and the Beast", or "Colors of the Wind" this year. I've always suspected there was a particular singing teacher with a partiality; I wonder if somebody's left town?

3. I have seen the new Doctor Who episode. The gap between a new Doctor Who episode airing in Britain and in Australia has been gradually decreasing: at first, the ABC wouldn't begin running a new season until the whole thing had run on the BBC, then they started airing new episodes with only a few weeks delay, then it got down to one week. It's probably stuck at one week as long as the BBC and ABC both prefer showing Doctor Who on Saturday evenings (the ABC can't show it on the same Saturday as the BBC because Saturday evening in Australia is Saturday morning in Britain, so Australia would be getting it first) - but this year, new episodes are being made available for viewing on the ABC's web site less than 24 hours after they debut in Britain. So I have seen the new episode, even though it hasn't actually aired in Australia yet.

I'm not going to do a reaction thingy, partly out of respect for

lost_spook's expressed intention not to read such things. (Probably a sensible attitude. Certainly some of the reactions I've been reading have made me wish I'd adopted a similar resolution.)

4. I assume everybody on my friendslist who's interested in the Liaden novels already knows that the latest one just came out in hardcover (and has probably already read the e-book), and that all the novels - including the latest one - have just been released as Audible.com audiobooks. Just in case, though, details are available here.

5. I've occasionally pondered the idea of an alarm clock that matches itself to your sleep cycles, so that the alarm goes off when you're in a position to wake up easily, and not when you're in the middle of a deep sleep. I'd always assumed that this would require being wired to the clock with some kind of complicated and impractical sensor to detect out where in the cycle you were. Apparently I was wrong: a lot of people can get by with assuming an average sleep cycle duration, and get the same effect with a normal alarm clock and a bit of mental arithmetic. Somebody recently pointed me to http://sleepyti.me/, which has an explanation of the math, and automatic calculators for both directions (one suggests good times to go to bed, given what time your alarm's set for, the other good times to set your alarm for, given when you plan to go to bed). I've been using the system for nearly a week, and getting good results. (Especially considering that I'd previously been giving serious thought to giving up on the alarm clock entirely because I slept through it so often.)

The pair of trousers I'm wearing now has been hanging at the back of my closet for months, nearly new. It's one of two pairs I bought last time I lost weight, and I only got to wear it a couple of times before it didn't fit me any more.

I've started an entry like that before; this is the other pair. That means I've achieved most of my getting-slimmer goals, and now just need to work on not letting things slip to the point of having to achieve them all again.

My getting-up-earlier turned out to be more fragile than I thought, and disappeared, taking the morning exercise with it, when winter rolled in. But I am eating more sensibly than I used to, if still not as sensibly as I might like.

One of the interesting effects of eating sensibly is that it seems to make it easier to eat sensibly. The frequency with which I impulsively add a chocolate bar or packet of crisps to my groceries is way down, and it's not just because I'm keeping myself on a tighter rein; I'm actually not feeling the impulse in the first place. (And one of the items in the Swancon report I still haven't finished is an observation on the urge to splurge in the context of hotel breakfast buffets, and specifically the fact that it didn't manifest this year.)

----

While I'm providing updates on old posts: When I moved into this office, I mentioned that it had an old and stupid air conditioner that didn't really do anything between "sweltering" and "penguin weather". I said at the time that I thought I was getting the hang of it, but in the end I mostly just left it off except when the weather was extreme enough to balance it.

Well, last week the office building replaced the last of its old and stupid air conditioners with newer and smarter ones. It's a considerable improvement.

One thing that's worrying me, though, is that once it's heated the room up to the required temperature, the air conditioner sometimes seems to be actually switching to cool air, as if to say "Too hot, now I'm going to cool it down a bit". I may be misinterpreting, though - another possibility is that it's maintaining the temperature with a stream of air that seems cool because it's only warm instead of full-bore hot (it's definitely not as cold as the air outside, anyway).

I wasn't sure whether to go into detail about the tinkering, but someone asked, so...

( Read more... )

When the subject comes up, I generally think of myself as being Not A Morning Person. On weekdays, even with the help of an alarm clock, I get up no sooner than necessary to grab breakfast and pull myself together before going to work. On weekends, it's not uncommon for me to be contemplating breakfast at lunchtime.

And yet.

And yet, when I go away for holidays, I regularly get up at what, for me, is bright and early in the morning. Without any particular effort, no alarm clock required. Observation of the phenomenon has led me to the conclusion that, although there's something to be said for "holidays", the important word in the sentence is "away".

So I've been tinkering with various aspects of my home environment, seeing if it's possible to recalibrate my morning-person-ness.

And it seems to be working. For the last week, I've been getting up earlier (and going to bed earlier). I've been using the extra time in the morning to establish an exercise routine.

This morning, being a public holiday, I decided to experiment with sleeping in. Alarm clock off, clock face turned away, no pressure to get up before I felt like getting up. And I felt like getting up at a time when, if there had been work to go to, I could have grabbed breakfast and pulled myself together and still been on time.

If you'd asked me what I'd be doing around this time on a Sunday morning, I'd have probably said something about not being sure I'd even be awake.

"Ticking off the last item on my list of things that need to be done today" wouldn't have been anywhere on the radar.

In some ways this has been a very strange week.

Profile

pedanther

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2025 03:15 pm