Sleep and morning routine
=========================

Made a small choice today to fix something that had been bothering
and which I have been complaining about for a couple days.

That thing is that now that the days are getting shorter and the sun
is getting up later, when I rely on rising with the sun, as I do
during the warmer months, I too naturally get up later, and so I am
left with the feeling that I walk directly from my bed to my office
and begin working. There is less time between the sun (and me)
getting and the start of my work day.

During the summer I had created a great routine of doing a short
meditation and some brief yoga, and doing a little journaling in the
morning. Feeling like I've lost the time and the ability to do that
was putting me into a sour mood. Both for feeling as though I've had
something taken away (humans hate loss aversion, and I am very human)
and also because the absence of meditatin and yoga has a negative
impact on my mind and my body.

The simple and obvious solution is to set an alarm, which I did to
great success this morning. I had avoided doing this though because
of my obession with sleep health, and the belief that any kind of
alarm shocks the nervous system, jolts the body, and disrupts the
mind.

The actual solution will be to fish my sunrise alarm clock out of
whatever box or drawer it ended up packed into when we moved this
summer.

If you, dear reader, have never considered using a sunrise alarm
clock, I encourage you to at least look into them. After commiting to
waking naturally, I find that each day begins peacefully, whereas
waking because of being startled by the loud noise of an alarm clock
feels like violence.

The other interesting thing that I've started doing on this front is
using what is either a new feature, or merely a feature I've never
noticed before, of the cooling pad I keep between my mattress and my
bedsheet. I use it each night to lower the temperature of my bed to
the ideal temperature for sleep. But what I had never done until
recently is use it to heat the bed in the morning to assist with
natural waking. This has been mostly successful! But it is not a
reliable timing mechanism. I don't know how to schedule the point at
which my body thinks, "It is warm enough to wake now." The sunrise
alarm clock is much more precise because you can set it to turn to
full brightness at such and such time, gradually over so and so
minutes. (Thirty minutes does the trick for me.)


Odd and ends
============

- Went for a run. Been trying to take it easy because of this
  persistant shin pain, but it's hard to be still.

- Played some Among Sus on tildeverse. Fun times!

- Talked books briefly with tomasino and we traded a few titles.
  Funnily enough, got my hands on a volume of The Shadow that I've
  been idlly looking for for a while now and which, never even having
  read it, I've based an RPG module on.

- my toot from the other day has, as of this writing, 98 boots and
  110 faves. Far more penetration than I am used to having from my
  tiny little corner of the fediverse. I feel kind of exposed.