Sleepy at 6:10 PM

So here's the thing about getting up at 4:30 to go to work: I don't like it. "But Tha Docta," I hear you saying, "When you get up early it leaves you refreshed and happy the rest of the day! Didn't Ben Franklin say it was good to get up early?" Well, first of all, stop quoting Ben Franklin to me. Secondly, the other part of that quote mentions going to be early, which I am incapable of doing on purpose. It's not that I don't like going to bed early (though that's also true). If I lay down before 10:00 on a regular night (i.e. a night after a day in which I didn't get up at 4:30), I just lay there and stare at the ceiling. So this presents an interesting situation on weeks when I work the opening shift at work. Alright, it's not interesting, but I'm writing about it anyway. So what happens is that I get up at 4:30 on the first day of the work week (today) after going to bed at probably 12:30 or 1:00 the night before (my usual bedtime), and once I get going in the morning, I'm fine. When I come home, however, I am no longer fine. I am sleepy like a mofo. That is the state in which I currently find myself. My wife, being the excellent person that she is, let me sit on the couch for most of the day and drift in and out of consciousness without getting outwardly annoyed, even though there are other things I'm sure she wishes I were doing. Luke, on the other hand, chose not to let me sleep for more than 10 consecutive seconds. Whenever he sees someone sleeping, he tells them to wake up. Such was the situation with me. So that's the summary of my day so far.

One of the things I'd like to do today is to clean out the garage a bit, because I'm pretty sure there's enough cardboard in there to build a house. Not a very sturdy one, mind you, but a house nonetheless. The holidays and two birthdays have left us with an abundance of cardboard, and I usually take all of it to the recycling bin but haven't had a chance yet. The issue right now is that it's so freaking cold in the garage. To demonstrate, I give you something that happened last year, but luckily not yet this year. Ladies and gentleman, the exploding soda can.

The first time this happened, we had gone to the grocery store and left the garage door open (the garage door acts up in the cold, as it proved again today when it refused to close as I left for work.) We came back and saw that there was soda slush all over the floor--the byproduct of three exploding sodas. I figured it was an isolated incident, since the cans were naked to the wind and cold for all of 10 minutes while we were gone. I was proven wrong the next day when another gunshot went off in the garage - the result of which you are currently looking at. So anyway, it's cold. It's also been snowing since yesterday, which results in an annoying thing called snow drifts, which happens with dry snow. I was not familiar with this phenomenon before coming to Indiana, having lived in Delaware (where the snow is wet and heavy) and Utah (where the snow is dry, but the wind is curtailed in large part by the mountains). The verdict is that I'm not a fan. There's half an inch of snow in some places, and two feet in other places.

That's it for me today. Tomorrow's post: A birthday party! Karaoke! Dinosaurs! Seven kids in one house! Steven Seagall!

(Okay, that last one's a lie.)