Still Not There Yet

Dearest Rachel –

I’ve been writing to you a lot this past week about our difficulties in getting ourselves acclimated to our home time zone; it’s just under a week now, and we’re still not there yet. Compare that to our trip out, where we basically fell in line with the local time after a day or so. To be sure, some of that was out of necessity, and in order to achieve it, we had to set alarms to force ourselves to wake up in time to catch both breakfast and the bus, but we made it happen.

Of course, that may well be the point; we made it happen by force. We had things to do and places to be at certain times, and in order to get out there to see them while it was still daylight, we did what we had to in order to keep up. We have no such compunctions in place here at home. Much the opposite, in fact; last night marked our return to working the Sparks club at church, so we needed to stay up and out late, as opposed to getting an early start on the day.

Then again, since I had some catching up to do with recording the attendance and activities from the past two Mondays, I recommended that we show up early so I could take care of that. Daniel was perfectly fine with that, despite it taking him away from watching anime with Logan, who had returned from the convention while I was at the ‘office’ yesterday. They only got to watch a couple of episodes before I made a point of getting the two of us out of the house.

Once there, things went fairly smoothly – at least, as far as I know; I’m not as much ‘in the trenches’ with the kids as most of the folks serving as leaders, not since I learned I couldn’t even control four second grade boys in such a role (or my temper at the fact). However, it must have gone better than that one night when all but two leaders couldn’t make it for one reason or another; talk out a perfect storm of absenteeism. And while I didn’t manage to do a lot of catching up during the course of our arriving early – and I’d been tasked with a new responsibility of distributing the books to each table within the various teams, rather than simply giving each team their books to sort through and distribute among their kids and leaders – by the end of the night, everything had been sorted out and brought up to date all the same. As far as I was concerned, everything went as well as such a night could go.

That being said, by the time we got home, Logan was already about to call it a night, as his workday starts at seven (and runs until five-thirty; what I would have called only a slightly long day in my work farce days is enough for him to parlay into a four-day week on the regular. Good for him for finding such a low-impact occupation, but man, I wish I could have had such an option back in the day. Then again, I don’t know what it pays, or what the advancement possibilities are, so perhaps I’ll set that aside until I know better), so we were on our own to entertain ourselves. And we would have, except that a couple of videos in, I realized that Daniel was that much more quiet than usual.

Sure enough, he was basically out cold, although it was hard to tell at first glance. The fact that he wears that hoodie almost perpetually makes it difficult to see his eyes unless you look closely. Nevertheless, that closer inspection was enough to tell that he’d nodded off after a relatively late night for one still not yet adjusted to the present time zone.

And I decided to not push the matter, but rather lean into it. While I’m not going to bother with hitting the gym today, seeing that I’ll be meeting Lars for our usual walk for the first time in three weeks (and I’ve no desire to head to the gym in this wee-hour rain, at any rate, although it’s supposed to let up by the time we’re to meet at eleven), I’ve been finding the morning half of our whole “early to bed, early to rise” schedule created by not yet adjusting to Central Time to actually be quite the discipline. Even if I’m not going through an exercise routine, it affords me time to get this letter together for you before needing to attend to other responsibilities. All in all, I see no reason to adjust; and if Daniel’s going to fall in line with the schedule himself, I’m going to lean into it, if not encourage him to stick to it outright himself.

So when I discovered he’d nodded off some time before nine, I just let it happen, switching off the television and the lights in the room, and crawling into bed myself. He could be comfortable for as long as he would be able; I wasn’t going to disturb him unless and until he was ready to disturb himself; until then, he could get as much sleep in here as he wanted.

That turned out to take him until half past one – so, not a full night’s sleep, but I assumed he was simply relocating himself, although not without spending some time poring over his newsfeed before getting the rest of his unconscious hours he might need. While I attempted to feign sleep at the time, I was aware of his rising and relocating, and actually found myself almost fully awake within the following half hour, because, as I’ve been saying this whole time, we’re not quite there yet, and may not be for some time to come, as far as getting properly aligned with the circadian rhythm of the local area.

As it so happened, by the time I finally gave up on going back to sleep myself and rolled out of bed, I found him already (still?) in his rocker/recliner in the family room. Evidently, my assumption was mostly correct, with the exception being that the perusal of his news channels was sufficiently engrossing that morning arrived without his even bothering to go back to bed, so he’s still six or seven hours out of alignment with the time, too.

Then again, I still think the advantages of starting the day early might yet outweigh the drawbacks, so I may just keep this up for a while yet. We’ll see how well this works, and how long it takes before I slide back into the usual routine. For now, though, keep an eye on both of us, honey, and wish us luck. We’re probably going to need it.