OK... the above meme is a tad bit of an exaggeration. At the moment the sun is setting around 6pm. After the time change it will set around 5, and slowly set earlier until about the end of November when it will go down at around 4:30... and hover there until about mid-December when it will slowly start climbing back the other direction.
Yes... I'm a bit obsessed with this topic.
Anyone who's followed my blog for a while knows that I'm NOT a morning person, and that I get really depressed with the darkness this time of year. So every year about this time I vow to reform my night owl ways, and every year I fail spectacularly. Sigh.
This year, things seem to be going a bit better than usual though, so I've got my fingers crossed.
It actually started with my flu shot... or maybe it was the Tdap (Tetanus, Diphtheria & Pertussis vaccine.) Just in case you were wondering, going for a 45 mile bike ride the day after getting a vaccination is probably not the smartest move. It was such a beautiful day though... and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but by mile 15 my legs felt like they were made of lead, and by the time I got home I felt like I'd been hit by a truck!
The long and short of it is that I felt totally miserable for a few days. Normally I would have just taken some ibuprofen an not worried about it - but somehow I got a little voice telling me that it might not be a good idea, so I took to the interwebs and discovered some new research showing that taking any sort of analgesic before or after a vaccination makes said vaccination significantly less effective. Basically you end up blunting the immune response, which is sorta the whole point of the vaccine!
So I decided to just tough it out... which meant that I've been going to bed really early (for me) at around midnight. And remarkably enough, I've actually been sleeping through the entire night... like several nights in a row... that NEVER happens!
Of course, I've got some extra incentive to get out of bed at a reasonable hour... actually 4 little hungry feline incentives outside...
Plus, with the greenhouse cover on the hail house, it gets really warm in there once the sun comes up, so I need to open the windows lest I fry all of the plants I'm trying to protect!
Anyhow, I'm feeling much better now, and CatMan & I have been cramming in all of the long bike rides that we can before winter sets in.
This was from the ride the day after the flu shot... see why I couldn't say no? |
I also ordered a few strings of Christmas lights... the neighbors are gonna die of shock... the grinch is decorating?!?
Actually, some of them are little solar garden lights that I put on my little kitty cemetery - somehow it makes me feel better knowing there are lights out there. And the others I bought to use as indicator lights because I've decided that it's a real pain to keep plugging and unplugging the outdoor kitty heating pads, so I bought some remote control switches - but since I can't see if the heating pads are on or not, I wanted something that would make it easy.
So yes... cats are really the only thing that motivates me!
Speaking of which... Little Blackie is getting less scared of me, so I finally got a few shots of him/her... Not totally in focus but you get the idea...
And I think there are gonna be some early mornings involved in trapping them and getting them all fixed...
Anyhow, that's how I'm dealing with the impending darkness... how about you? Do you get depressed when the days get shorter? What do you do to deal with it?