Kukka*

I am not a morning person.

When I have been left alone without any other obligations (when was that, again?), I tend to sleep from 4am-10or12. But now I have a job, and although my boss has been very understanding of this (letting me work 11am-7pm instead of 9am-5pm), it has come time for me to start waking up earlier and getting in to work much earlier (so I stop missing morning deliveries and whatnot). I have tried a couple of different things to do this, but so far none of them seem to work for more than about 1 week. Normally, I like to wake up, brew tea and make oatmeal, walk the dog while they're steeping, and then read online news while I eat and drink. However, this whole process takes about 1 hour (probably because I usually eat ~1kg of oatmeal at one go). So for a week I tried getting up and skipping breakfast and just going to work. However, I don't generally eat lunch, so this didn't work for very long at all as I found myself falling asleep at my desk. So I tried using my cell phone as an alarm and putting it on the other side of the apartment so I'd have to get out of bed to turn it off. This didn't work either. I have also tried eating dinner earlier (~6pm, as opposed to ~10pm) so that the food won't keep me up. This, too, is not working.

So, reader, what works for you? How do you trick yourself in to getting up in the morning? How do you convince yourself that you're sleepy before 2am?

*That is not a new addition to the English language (see "Blurf" below). It's a Finnish word that means "rooster". This seemed appropriate because roosters=morning in Looney Tunes, which I am convinced are more accurate representations of life than any sitcom I've ever seen.