wiredgonzo

One of my main goals for Lent has been to rise earlier in the day. So far, I have managed to make some progress. I am getting up with an alarm clock and am not beating it into submission which I was once prone to do on a regular basis. Some days are better then others. More often than not I can walk the dog without resorting to sleepwalking.

As for my goal of waking up early and enjoying the morning: At this point I am succeeding with the first part, but haven’t realised the payoff of reaching my goal. I don’t feel like I am getting any real benefit personally from waking up early.

However, I am inspired by this article that I found online. Maybe it will inspire you too. There is hope.

10 benefits of early rising and how to do it

Enjoy… and before you continue on with your day, could you please pass me the coffee?

Sites like FaceBook and Linkedin are helping me reach my goal of reaching out to old friends. I have found both of these sites useful in finding and reaching out to old friends and former colleagues.

I find that MySpace is geared towards people of a younger demographic and I feel funny lurking there. Facebook is a little more relevant, but still geared towards twenty-somethings, which (un)fortunately I am no longer eligible to call myself. However, if you take it all in with a grain of salt, Facebook can be a lot of fun. Linkedin is geared more towards professional relationships, but that isn’t all bad and can actually be useful.

As useful as some of the social networking sites are, at this stage it would seem that not too many people who graduated high school in the 80’s populate them. This is a shame because many of the people I miss the most I haven’t seen since 1990 or thereabouts. I am not (yet) willing to pay classmates.com to find out if anyone I knew in high school or college are still alive and surfing (the net, not the waves). So I’ll keep an eye out for old friends wherever I can, and when I can and hope for the best.

I have been only partially successful in accomplishing this goal so far. The hardest part is finding a way to balance my need for sleep with my responsibilities as a volunteer firefighter, my family, my dog, and myself (in that order?!).

One of the goals that I have set for myself this year is to wake up earlier. I don’t want to just wake up, stumble from bed to my coffee, to my shower, growl at my family and the dog, and stumble again out the door an hour later; I want to be up, productive, energetic, and happy to be alive at sunup.

The trouble I am having with this goal is my lifestyle. The key to accomplishing this goal, it seems to me is a consistent sleep pattern. Getting a solid block of sleep is not always possible for me, as I am on call all-hours as a volunteer fireman. As a firefighter I am often responsible for getting up at all hours of the night, leaving home, going to the fire station and responding to emergency calls any time the fire radio or pager alerts. Some nights we don’t get any calls, or maybe one or two, and other times we are slammed. Last night for example we had three calls: the first beginning around 10:00 p.m., a second at 11:30 p.m., and a third and longer call at 12:30 a.m., which I did not get home from until after 2:30 a.m. So much for getting up early today… Fortunately it was holiday, but I didn’t get up and do anything productive until almost 11:00 a.m.

My grandfather was up every day at 5:30 a.m. and the tasks he set aside for himself for a day were half accomplished by 11:00 a.m. I am still looking for my second cup of coffee by then.

I can get up for a job and be there at 8:00, 8:30, and 9:00a.m., like everyone else; I am just not myself until almost 10:00 a.m. or 11:00 o’clock in the morning. It would be great if I could figure out a way to exist on cat naps and be able to approximate being human at sunup; if anyone has any advice on how to do this (legally) I would appreciate hearing from you.

Being serious now… The iPod I purchased at the beginning of the year is my favorite new toy. I bought the 30gb Video iPod and have just about filled it up with MP3’s and a few iTunes. It’s been a lot of fun rediscovering some of the songs on my CD collection and more than I few new songs (all legal of course) that I found online on garageband, ilike.com, SxSW, etc. I am very happy with my purchase as you can tell.

I drink water every time I excercise or drill—inside or out. I drink water between lunch and dinner and as often as I can at lunch time. I have replaced soda pop in my diet with either water or a Gatorade or Powerade.

On the down side, I still drink a fair amount of coffee in the mornings which is something I need to work on. I also drink a lot of iced tea, but you gotta be allowed to be bad some times right?

I am convinced that Classical music helps me maintain connections in my brain to past events / memories, creative moments emotional peaks that I would otherwise lose touch with.

More often than I would like to believe lately I find myself being or saying something negative or angry before I realize what I am doing. I don’t always know where the negative energy is coming from on these occasions, it just seems to be there under the surface and escapes when I am not on guard.

I am better at guarding against the behavior in public, but find myself too easily slipping into this behavior at home with family. I would really like to find a way to stop. My family deserves better. Although I know that I love them and they know it to, they do not deserve to wallow in my negativity any more than I do.

Dwelling on the past, and (worse) beating one’s self up for past mistakes is easier to do than than it is to forgo the past and live for the present and revel in the future. Still the effort is worth it. The trick is to keep reminding yourself of this every time those little “would a, could a, should a’s” grow from a quiet whisper to a loud clatter in your head. For some, mastering this is easier than quieting the louder critics that masquerade as family, friends, and colleagues.

Drinking water is something you would think would come easy for me. After all, I preach to others that they should drink more al the time.

Preaching the benefits of proper hydration is part of my job description as a Safety Officer for our local fire department. I not only push water consumption around the fire house and the emergency scene, I push it at drills and even at meetings too. I have preached the benefits of drinking water so much that I have seriously run the risk of being known around the fire house as the “water boy.”

Now, here’s the kicker… I personally drink more caffeinated beverages (specifically coffee and iced tea) by volume on any typical day than I even come close to in drinking water.

It’s a dirty little secret, but it’s true.

I really should do better, because I KNOW better. I really do.

Giving up smoking is one of the toughest things I ever did, but with luck and a bit of stubborness, I eventually succeded. Best of all (or worst, depending on your opinion) I did it 17 years ago at a time when literally everyone I knew smoked, and many smoked like fiends. Now, 17 years later, I am very proud (and greatful)that I don’t smoke.

My apologies to Nike, but their slogan fits this goal to T. Living near Buffalo New York, walking is something we enjoy. The trouble is those world-famous winters we have here make it difficult to stay motivated to walk all year long. Enter all of this in our live last year ~ the new puppy that joined my family last year. Riley (a Lab) not only needs to be walked three times everyday, but WANTS to be outside to frollic and explorer with his nose ~ the world in ALL kinds of weather. Riley keeps me walking, healthy, happy, and gives me warm fuzzy peace of mind to boot.

I walk every day. That is my dog, a Labrador Retriever named Riley walks me. I call it walking it’s more like we “wander.” What we really do is roam the neighborhood and the adjacnt park and trail, while Riley sniffs everything in “sight.” We do this once or twice each day, rain or shine for 20 – 40 minutes at a stretch. It’s realy not as much excercise as it is a comnination of male bonding and a continuing struggle between a man and his beast.

What I really need is less bonding and more excercise.