Early in the mornin'

[Rather disjointedly written since I'm not awake at the moment. Do not read if you severely dislike long and pointless ramblings.]

For the last four nights I've been trying to go to bed early. Ha bloody ha. The first three of those four nights the light went off between 01:00 and 02:00. Yesterday was better - I went out and so was tired when I got home, practically falling asleep at 10pm. Light out by 23:30, which is reasonable for me.

And then, tired and exhausted as I was - demonstrated by the fact that I only read one chapter before my eyes gave up on me - I tossed and turned for quite a while. No sleep forthcoming at all.

I gave up at 02:00 and wandered downstairs in the vague hope of tiring myself out some more, read Private Eye, and then remembered that I had an unwatched episode of Red Dwarf that I taped a few weeks ago.

I watched it. Still not sleepy.

Never mind, I thought, I'll start watching Six Feet Under from this week. [1]. Not the whole episode, you understand. Just until the first ads break, maybe.

And then - about one SFU episode later - I thought I'd just check my email. Astute reader, note the 'just'.

Did I mention 'ha bloody ha'?

So what else would you be doing at 05:00 other than checking your blogroll and cursing people for not being awake and writing at this insane hour? Last time I did this I ended up writing my one and only piece of fanfic from 04:00 until 07:30. [No, you can't see it. It was written under duress (for an informal competition) and is not my proudest piece of work. If you ignore the plot - actually, you don't need to because there isn't one - it's readable, and the characters are even pretty much in character, if the reader is familiar enough with them.] [Actually, I've just reread it for the first time in a year, and it's not too bad. Apart from the aforementioned non-plot and the fact that I really could have done with another 1,000 words, it's all right. Anyone want to read it? You'll have to be a Discworld fan to get it though, City Watch in particular and Men At Arms more specifically.]

And while I was cursing all you people who failed to provide me with more reading material I thought I'd try IRC for the first time ever, and now I'm quite glad I never got around to it when I was doing my A-levels - I'd have wasted an incredible number of hours on it! Whereas blogging, of course, was a wholly suitable and fruitful use of my time...

I've said before that I am not a morning person, and I am most definitely not an early-morning person. So. On what is probably the one day in the year when I might actually get to witness a sunrise, it's cloudy. Lovely.