52 Changes - Banish the Snooze!

As many of you may know, my wife is currently just short of halfway through a Master’s program, and just completed a semester in which she was working full-time while simultaneously taking two online courses.  Needless to say, she was really busy and didn’t have time to do much else.  Apparently that seemed like a really good excuse for me also to not do much around the house, and the place kinda went to crap.  Junk started piling up, dishes went unwashed, we cooked at home less frequently.  It was relaxing, not doing any of the household responsibilities, but it was also really lazy.

Toward the end of the semester, I took a mental step back and looked around.  While having lots of free time and nothing to do helped me make a lot of progress on my movie list (8 this month, seriously), I wasn’t moving forward with any of my other interests.  For all I talk about loving to cook, we really hadn’t made much of interest the past month or two.  As much as I consider myself a planner, I hadn’t consistently made a meal plan since the end of the winter.  I hardly played with the cats, had fallen out of reading, and had just written cursory blog posts, mostly about movies.

Now, before you think I’ve been really down lately, we did make time to do a lot of fun stuff.  We camped, went to baseball games, traveled locally, went to the Farmer’s Market, planted an awesome garden; all the things we enjoy.  It was just my big goals that had slipped.  I started the year vowing to get better at cooking, and actually learning some skills, but spent more time on the couch than in the kitchen.  So, it’s time to make some changes.  You’ve seen how I bought a new pan and made some nice, real food earlier this week.  But since I love lists, I’m also making lists of changes I want to make to get back into the groove of actually doing the things I say I like.

And just to get nuts, I’m going to try to make a change a week, and keep up each prior one as I go along.  Honestly, I just really love resolutions and fresh starts, so the true challenge will be maintaining the process.  But it’s worth a shot, and if nothing happens, well, I’m no worse off than when I started.  The first one’s simple, and started this Monday: no more snooze!

For background, here’s how a typical morning in the Zink household went prior to Monday.  First alarm went off at 6:00 AM, Greg hits snooze before Stacia can even wake up, and goes back to sleep.  Snooze lasts five minutes, then the alarm goes off again, Greg hits it and goes back to sleep.  Meanwhile the cats have heard the alarm and know we should be getting up, so they start doing this.  We brush them off and go back to sleep.  In total, our alarm allows five snoozes at five minutes apiece, so we spend almost half an hour getting sleep in five-minute increments.  Finally I look at the alarm and realize it’s the last snooze, so we stumble out of bed and get ready.

That snooze button is tempting when the damn alarm is waking you up, but if you think about it once you’re out of bed, it’s not doing you any good.  It’s not exactly restful sleep if you’re being jolted out of it every five minutes.  If you trusted yourself to just wake up when the alarm goes off in the first place, you can set it those 25 minutes later, still be up and about at the same time, and get a more complete night’s sleep.  Or you could keep the early alarm and actually get more use out of your morning.  When you think about it logically, it’s really logical.  Logic rarely factors in when you are groggy and waking up, but people can be trained.

So week one of my 52 changes is to say banish the snooze button.  As soon as my cell phone alarm starts singing, “doo-doo-doo, good mor-ning!” (no kidding, this is my alarm ringtone), I am getting up.  I started this Monday, mostly without informing Stacia, and five days in, things are going really well.  It’s an adjustment for sure, but I’d wager that we can get used to it to the point where we can’t remember the days of asking for “uno mas” snoozes ad infinitum.

I’m not entirely sure I’ve come up with 51 other things I want to change yet, so I may need suggestions, or need to start getting really creative once I get further in.  And some of them are sure to be more fun, especially the cooking-related ones.  But if the overall goal is to get me away from being lazy, the snooze is kind of the poster child for the cause.  Kick that out, and then we can really get going.