Flashes of Panic

My nieces are in their sleeping bags on my bed, because it has the door that closes and they don’t like the idea of having Iz wake them up at 5 AM expecting breakfast.

My brother is, I think, on the couch, but I can’t tell if I’m hearing him playing with the cat or if it’s the springs in the sofa-bed squeaking.

I am upstairs in my office, having decided this morning that I will be better able to code the Algorithms programming project in Java rather than C. (So far, I am right: it still doesn’t do anything useful, but at least I have some feedback from Eclipse that what I have written so far should compile.) If I sleep, it will be in the guest room, which adjoins the office.

I am promised that the girls are capable of eating their weight in pancakes, and I intend to test this empirically in a few hours.

Despite the past nine years of conditioning myself to wake up before 8:30 or so, I have reverted to my undergraduate schedule, which was, roughly:

• Work (for some approximations of “work”) until approximately 1 AM.
• Sleep until the last possible moment allowing a shower and arrival at the dining hall before breakfast closed. This time varied by dorm, but in my senior year, when I lived next door, it was almost 9 AM.

I could make it to work in Pennsylvania if I was out of bed by 8 and ran at lunch, but once I moved back to Amherst I had to be up around 6 every morning in order to run before work. I got on a 6-to-10 schedule which worked pretty well for me. Until now.

The problem is, I have conditioned A. to running in the morning, and Iz to being fed at 6 AM (or, as he prefers to interpret it, “half an hour before dawn cracks.”) Therefore, it’s a bit harder to work like an undergrad than it used to be.

However, I seem to do my best work between 11 PM and 1 AM.

Now Playing: The Wee Hours Review from by Roman Candle