Winter is Stupid

From my Spark blog Tuesday, January 17, 2012

At 5:30 every morning my alarm sounds: time to get up! From about mid-April through September, I jump right out of bed (mostly because I have to pee), at get started in on my day. I love mornings. I love to watch the sun come over the mountains (I live in Utah, and the mountains here are incredible), I love to listen to the birds singing, I love how quiet it is on my street before everyone starts rushing off to work. But right around the first part of October, I don't like getting up with my alarm anymore. I've decided that it's winter: it's stupid! I have learned that I only like mornings when I get up with the sun. I DO NOT LIKE GETTING UP BEFORE THE SUN!

There, I said it: early mornings are for days when the sun gets up before the people do, not for cold, dark winter days. I struggle for nearly half the year getting moving in the mornings. My bed is warm, the floor is cold; and the sun's still in bed, I should be, too. The problem is, when I don't get up with the alarm, I don't have time to exercise. When I don't exercise in the mornings, I eat more during the day - I have yet to figure out that correlation - so winter time has come to mean pack-on-the-pounds time. Last month (December) I gained 14 pounds - 14! That is unacceptable.

What I need to do is create my own little sunshine, at least in my mind, so that I can love dark mornings as well as bright mornings. Right now, as one of my little starter goals for this year, I have my alarm set to play music. Music can heal the soul, and tame the spirit, so it stands to reason that it can create sunshine in the mind, as well.

I am a music junkie, seriously addicted to it. I have over 8,000 songs on my i-pod, and something in every genre, it's actually getting kind of ridiculous to keep it all organized. But, I love it! Having said that, it's easy to pick a different "get up and go" song every day. Sometimes I wake up to a rousing "Anvil Chorus" from the opera Il Trovatore. Sometimes I wake to the Quantum Leap Theme song, sometimes I get moving to Duran Duran's "Reach Up for the Sunrise", and other days I start with "Defying Gravity" from the musical Wicked.

Whatever I begin the day with, it sort of sets the mood: I will conquer, I can do anything, every day is new, I can fly, whatever. I'm so glad that I have music to start my days, I know I couldn't do without it.