The Falling of the Year

Summer must be well and truly over because I've parked my fold-up bike in the office and am back to driving to the BART station on the home end. I think I held out longer last year but I don't feel like searching through FB entries to see if I commented on it. Last winter I thought seriously about hunting down one of those "simulated sunrise" timed bedroom lights to see if it would help with my sleep habits, but when I looked around I couldn't easily find one I liked. Last weekend I saw one at Fry's and picked it up. It has a reasonably bright light that slowly waxes starting 15 minutes before the alarm set time. You can also have accompanying sound: either a radio station or one of 4 possible "natural soundscapes" (birds, frogs, waterfall, waves). The problem is that you can't have the light increase and the sound increase on separate schedules and after some initial experimentation I've confirmed that the sound wakes me immediately while the light works as intended to wake me slowly. So I have the light set to get me primed and then the regular radio alarm to make sure I don't sleep through it.

So far it seems to be a clear success, although I wouldn't discount the possibility that I'm waking more fully simply because it's a new stimulus. Well, actually the problem isn't "waking fully" it's more a problem with wake-up whiplash, going from fast asleep to stumbling out of bed without the proper interim brain cycles. So there's still some fine-tuning of the time settings to do. I think I can set the alarm about 15 minutes later than currently as long as everything's laid out and ready to go, and as long as I don't doze through the alarm.

The other part of fall is setting the automatic light timers in the living room so that I'm not stumbling around in the dark in the morning or coming home to a dark house in the evening. Thus is the shortening of daylight measured. Of course, it isn't dark yet on the homecoming commute but that will come.