It’s almost that time of year again, unfortunately. Spring forward, Fall backward. Daylight Saving Time. The good ol’ “confuse your body by altering the time associated with sunrise and sunset” event of now late-Winter. I mean, I’m excited to be able to drive home before it’s fully dark in maybe another week or two, but I’m not looking forward to feeling more tired than usual (if that’s even possible). Nor am I looking forward to how weird driving at sunrise and sunset are going to be for at least a week while everyone else adjusts to the change in the time-to-sunlight ratio in a way that somehow makes them a worse driver. It’s going to be a wild week and I’m going to be going into it with even less sleep than usual, which is a little rough these days considering how absolutely exhausted I am from a combination of burnout and trying a new medication that has me feeling pretty sleepy most days. All that said, I stand to benefit from it a little bit, too. My sleep schedule is usually at its worst during the winter months because I function better during DST than off it since I tend not to sleep through as much of the morning sunlight as I might otherwise. I love a later sunset, after all, and I’m really hoping that I can use this as the impetus to finally fix my sleep schedule. And, you know, for all my clocks to finally be right again (I stopped changing them years ago and now just let them be wrong for three solid months).
Continue readingDaylight Saving Time
Daylight Saving Time Is Bullshit And Other Monday Thoughts
Daylight Saving Time is back in the US and continues to be some absolute bullshit. My entire rhythm is fucked up. You’d think that, with how messed up my sleep schedule already is, that I’d be a bit less troubled by other disruptions. You’d think wrong. I’m just as susceptible to the disruption of having the sun’s position relative to only my external clocks suddenly change. So, despite getting a decent amount of sleep over the weekend, I’m still starting this week with less than I’d like thanks to having my sleep cut short by an hour on Sunday and then struggling to fall asleep later that same day. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do some course correction as I go through this week, but I’ve got a lot of potential events on my calendar for this week (mostly in the evenings [and none of which wound up happening]), so there’s no knowing how long its going to take for me to sort this out [the answer was still “all week” though]. After all, a lot of my struggles around getting to bed on time are a result of trying to make some time to enjoy myself or play some video games in the evening and I might be even shorter on that time than usual. Plus, thanks to all those events, I have to make sure I’m getting out of bed on time so I can actually get my usual ten-hour days in before I have to leave work for my evening events, which means my usual release valve of “sleep in a bit” isn’t available until Friday at the earliest and even then I’ll want to avoid being too late to work on Friday since I don’t think I’ll be able to bank any extra time this week to balance out any days that have to end early.
Continue readingFinding Comfort In The Cool Fall Weather
So far, the cooler seasons are off to a great start for me, personally. I’ve not only learned that my apartment can get a decent enough cross-breeze if the wind is coming from the right direction, but that just closing the windows is enough for the temperature to start rising inside it, even after the sun has shifted from shining through the windows to just reflecting off the roof. Any day where I’ve felt like my apartment got too cold overnight (the lowest I’ve seen it so far was just under sixty degrees and that was a night it was almost freezing outside), all I have to do is close the windows and it will warm right back up again. My old apartment could not be counted on to ever warm back up and then stay warm throughout the day unless I had the heat running. As a result of all that, I actually had my windows open for over two weeks in a row, adjusting how open they were to control the temperature and enjoying every minute of fresh air I was getting. In fact, the only reason they weren’t open longer is because I left for the weekend to visit a friend and wanted to see what would happen during a relatively chilly weekend if I left all the windows shut and the air off. It worked out pretty well, though it never got quite as warm as I’d hoped it would, so I’ll probably need to run a few more tests to dial in my expectations.
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