How fitting that I am up at 5:30 on the first day of spring. I have had this little embarrassing problem since I was a kid; every so often, I have a ridiculously gruesome nightmare, and I wake up and am too chicken to go back to sleep lest it continue. Usually I end up getting up, checking the door locks, and watching Canada AM until the sun rises. The few times that hubby has goaded me into watching a horror flick with him, this has been my pattern for sometimes weeks afterward. No slasher flick last night, just a bad dream. But, bonus, I forgot it was officially Spring today, and I'm up to get an early start to the day's chores so I can enjoy the sun later, an watch it rise shortly.
I love how the days suddenly get so much longer now. All of a sudden, 4:30pm darkness seems a distant memory. I have a really nice neighbour next door and yesterday evening I saw her kids head off with their dad for the evening, so I brought two chairs and a bottle of wine out onto my stoop and walked over and knocked on  her door. "Okay, I know your kids are gone, so come have a drink with me." I think I said. She didn't need much convincing. She had a sparkly shamrock tattoo on her arm- she is a nurse but also works at one of the local pubs to help pay for her son's triple A hockey. It frustrates me that children's sports are so prohibitively expensive; her son has a lot of talent and obviously loves the game, so she does what she has to, but it shouldn't have to be that way, I don't think. A mother shouldn't have to be out serving drinks at 2am on a Friday night when she could be at home with her family.
I really enjoyed sitting on the porch and watching the world go by with her, getting a little buzzed and laughing at how "country" we were, drinking out on the street. She joked that since there is no backyard behind her apartment, she could never enjoy a drink outside because she didn't want to be seen sitting on her front stoop drinking by herself. I told her to embrace her inner redneck* a little, and soon we had a little crowd of other neighbours that came out to join us. I do not enjoy the cramped feeling of living right on the main drag of town, but I do so very much enjoy the sense of community.

I'm going to get the household paperwork done now while the babe sleeps, then feed us both in an hour or two. We'll get dressed for the day, say our morning prayer together, give the snakes fresh water, and take the dog for a walk. Tuesday is bathroom cleaning day, and if it's sunny I'll put the clothesline to work. The diaper liners could use a day disinfecting in the sun after a winter of drying in the dryer.

If I can get the mundane stuff over with early, I'll spend the rest of the day enjoying the sun and working in the garden. There is so much to do and it is slow, slogging work cleaning out all the beds, since I did not do any tidying up last fall. I also really need to pooper-scoop. I might need a backhoe. Ugh.

Isn't it amazing how much we aspire to before the day gets started! Ha!
What are you up to today?


*If anyone is inclined to feel offended at this term, I should qualify it by saying that I use it with a sense of pride, not in a derogatory way. Rednecks used to refer to hard working union men, coal miners and oil rig workers. My hubby always calls himself a redneck because every year, the first warm day in spring his neck turns the colour of tanned leather in the sun and stays that way 'til winter. These days the word has been commandeered to refer to poor, uneducated country folk. Well, this porch-drinking, university-educated, aspiring intellectual-agrarian is taking it back.