Figuring Out Plan B

This is a short work week for me because tomorrow (and Saturday) I'll be at the Choristers' Guild workshop, so I'll be spending a couple of days in choir director/singer mode. Having to get up that early (registration Friday is at 7:30, and it's at least a half-hour drive to get there) is going to be a shock to my system. I'm currently in hibernation mode, which means it's very hard to wake up in the morning.

And then to make things even more fun, I have an 8-10 a.m. service window Monday morning for my furnace checkup. I think someone believes I should be getting up earlier in the morning.

I definitely see seasonal sleeping patterns now that I'm not governed by the alarm clock. In the summer, I'm up early. In the winter, I tend to sleep very late, and all with more or less the same bedtime (though I'm probably reading later than I do in the summer). I keep seeing articles about sleep patterns from the era before electric lights, when apparently people didn't sleep straight through the night. They slept about four hours, then were awake for an hour or so and then slept another four hours. That in-between time was supposedly good for creativity, as that's when a lot of writing was done (which is one way we know about this pattern). Studies have shown that people will fall into this pattern if they're put into a similar environment without TV, electric lights, etc. People who do a lot of winter camping also notice it. Even though I'm not going to bed with the sun, I do tend to wake up for a while in the middle of the night, but I'm not really awake enough to be creative, other than daydreaming. My mind is awake, but making my body movie enough to even write down my thoughts would be impossible.

At any rate, I suspect that alarm will be really annoying in the morning. Fortunately, there's enough singing mixed in with the workshops and lectures to keep me somewhat awake throughout the day.

I think a couple of days of intense work in a different creative field will be good for me, at a time when I'm needing to do some thinking about next steps and where I go from here. As seems to be the case in my career, things never quite seem to go according to plan, so I'm going to have to come up with a plan B, which is going to create a ripple effect of changing other plans. It could work out for the best in the long run, but it's a bit disappointing (and frustrating) in the short run. It just would be nice for once to have something not be a struggle, to have the balance of power tip in my favor. I do need to find my inner soprano and be a bit more assertive about standing up for what I want and need instead of assuming that other people are doing their jobs and taking care of things. There were some things I let slide that I shouldn't have, but I just assumed that I was at the bottom of the priority list when in reality I'd actually accidentally fallen off the radar entirely and a reminder would have been welcome.