Like a Snow Day

Our phone rang shortly before 4:00 AM today. Now this is pretty disquieting for just about anyone. Our parents are all around 60 now and are of varying degrees of healthiness, so you wonder if you're going to hear about some medical calamity. Or, as is normally the case, it could be my company's 24 hour command center trying to reach me for something.

You know you're in trouble when the call starts with "I know you're not on call, but..." They were very apologetic about calling me and were clearly desperate because the normal people were not responsive. Since I claim that James 4:17 is an important verse to me (So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him this is sin) I figured I'd better do the right thing and see what was going on. It was a bit confusing, as usual, and it ended up that we were trying to get a file from someone that doesn't have after-hours support. There was nothing for me to do.

So here I was wide-awake at 4:20 AM. My alarm normally goes off at 4:45 AM, so I figured that I'd just stay up. I took care of some emails so that I would give the appearance of working hard. I feel like that gives me a mental start to my day, even if I don't work continuously from that point on (I am blogging now, after all). I made sure Amanda was not stirred by the alarm and then went about my normal morning business.

The cool thing is that, although my alarm goes off at 4:45 AM, I rarely get up right then. I usually spend 5-15 minutes contemplating my sleepiness and the comparative warmth of the bed against the chill of the room. But this time I was up and at 'em. I had worked out and showered by 7:00 AM. I got Lily up and we had breakfast. I then made some eggs for Amanda. My rhythm was then officially off.

This all reminds me a little bit of snow days. I can remember the bliss of getting up early and then learning that we didn't have to go to school that day. Amanda tells me that she used to go back to bed. I have a vivid memory of a high school snow day where I was playing video games at around 7:30 AM. I guess this is my personality as a morning person. I like to get that early jump on the day.

It seems that the power is out in our building...again. We had a brief outage this week and today they had maintenance planned to fix whatever got damaged in the previous outage. It was supposed to be just a brief blip. I guess that blip is getting bigger.

Remember the game "Blip" that was like a small desktop Pong/air hockey? You had three keys and had to hit the appropriate button as the light came to your side. Failure to stop it would be a goal for your opponent. Cool stuff with LEDs.