An Experiment In Time

moar kittehs  see caption vote share

I am about to try something that floors everybody who hears me say it.

I've always self-identified as a night-owl.  Mornings are like dirty words.  Or moldy bread.  Gag-worthy.

But my attempt to make the 8pm to 2am slot productive for my writing has failed over and over here at Mom's and I finally acknowledged that, unlike at home where my husband was in bed by 9pm, there were still too many distraction here well past midnight every night.  This caused me to put off taking my meds on schedule too many times so that I keep working during those quiet two or three hours after my sister was safely downstairs and that messed with the following day big time.

So I took a look at the other options and the only other one was early morning.  And I mean EARLY morning.

Mom heads to bed between 8 and 9 but is usually not up before 9am and then she is fending for herself for breakfast and sometimes a shower that takes her to noon at least before she needs anything from us.  I'm on duty for lunch everyday now and depending on when Mom finishes breakfast she can be ready for it as early as 12:30 or as late as 2.  My sister tries hard to get to bed before eleven but is often not getting there before midnight and unless she has appointments or errands she is seldom upstairs before 9am and then like me prefers as little socializing as possible for the first hour or so.

Thus I'm free until noon.  But from noon to 8pm there are all kinds of things going on.  The blocks of time I can count on for my own use are small and not always the same ones day to day.

So I'm looking at that block of time between 4am and NOON.  And drooling over it.

But to make it work I have to have my 7.5 hours of sleep beforehand.  Which means going to bed with Mom or even before.  I've been reading aloud to her in the evenings and we usually finish about 8 or 8:30 and then it takes her a goo part of an hour to get ready for bed.  If I was ready to head to bed too I could hope to be waking up between 4 and 5.

That's the tricky part tho.  If it is going to work I have to be waking up without an alarm as that would be rude to have an alarm go off on Mom that early.  Which means I have to be asleep by 9.

The other big issue is whether my brain can wake up fast enough get any productive use of those hours.  This will be a great test for the Adderall.

So I'm in the process of stepping back my sleep and med schedule by two hours per night.  I'd been taking my meds at 2am but I took them at midnight last night and am going to take them as soon as I'm posted tonight.  Which I'd hoped would be by ten but I had browser issues that froze me out earlier and had to restart the browser in the middle of working on this.  It is ten-thirty now so I'm a half hour off the plan.  But I'm hoping to be awake by 7 am in the morning.  Then possibly tomorrow night I can take the meds before 9.

We shall see.

Oh the things we do for our art...