It is currently 0500. For you non-military types, it's 5:00 AM. Note the AM part. It is early and, yes, I am up. This is not by choice but when one is on-call one can be summoned at any moment by the magic of the pager. Its heart-stopping, nerve-shaking tones drags one from the deepest, most pleasant dreams into the harsh cold reality of Friday morning! But no matter. Now that I am up I decided that I would stay up since the alarm was set to go off at 5:45 anyway.
Speaking of Friday morning, in just under two hours I will be off of call for another four weeks. If you care to look on the calendar this puts my next call rotation during our visit to Ames for our Bowman side of Christmas.
Speaking of Christmas, this time of year becomes hard for me to focus at work. It's almost like vacation in the fact that I know I have several days coming up in the near future where I will be off for various holiday festivities and I find myself at odd times counting the minutes. However, the boss has had a great number of extras for me to be working on this past year so the times I get to spend counting the minutes (in these, now rare moments, minutes actually feel like hours! I wonder if this is a phenomena akin to wind chill--it says it's -3 degrees below zero but it feels like -120! We could call it..."On and ON" as in, "This day is dragging "on and on!" The On and On factor today is 2. For every minute you stare at the clock today, it feels like two hours.") is considerably lessened!
In reality, I don't mind being up early. When everyone is in bed it is a lot more peaceful. At night you can get a lot of traffic and even just the feel in the air is of unsettled chaos. But in the early hours of the day, once you get out of bed, the entirety of life seems a bit more peaceful and rested. Once I manage to pry the sleep-coated eyelids open and the heart starts beating again, the early mornings are really a nice time.
(It must be really cold outside, the furnace has kicked on three times in the last 30 minutes. That is such an encouragement to go out and go to work! Brrrr! Or as Alyssa used to say, "BOOOO it's code!") tee hee!
So long for now. Stay warm!
Bye!
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