The last few years I really slipped into night owl habits and certainly enjoyed it. Let’s see… great theatre takes place at night, all my friends are online at night, it’s much easier to get some co-op going on at night and these are all good things. I did all my writing and work at night and my daytime hours just kept getting shorter. There’s no one thing that made me want to flip those hours back to the very early ones of my childhood — 6 am hockey practice? Been there, done that! — but I knew I really wanted to make it happen. I thought this wake/sleep switch would be much harder than it was but I nailed it within a week. Go me.

I do miss the nightlife a little, since getting up before 6 am does mean I can’t stay up until 2 without seriously feeling it, but I am happier for it. It will be even better when the sun starts showing up nice and early, too! While waking up before the alarm is second nature the most difficult adjustment has been switching my productive hours to something resembling ‘normal’. Getting up and going to bed? No problem. Actually doing work before noon? Little harder though progress has been made. By the end of this week I hope all will be completely natural and my friends will stop calling it a miracle that I’m up before the sun ;)

I’ve discovered another perk with these new hours: gaming when it’s light out makes me feel like a little kid again! Remember back when you had a set bedtime? You absolutely had to get your gaming done before the parents went stomping on the floor to tell you brush your teeth and get upstairs and this was the LAST WARNING EVER. Or else. My parents used to take the controllers away if we played too much. Eventually they figured out that I had my own hidden set and would take the power cords instead. Those were much harder for wee ones to replace. Ahem. The games I play these days are quite different though. It just feels different to be assassinating people at noon as opposed to midnight. Ditto for sending out my direction-impaired acid bird out at not-terribly-worried bandits. Wii games, however, have always been a daytime thing for me so there’s no switch going on there. I guess the only thing left for me to do is make more friends in opposing time zones and start working on my foreign languages!

So, uh, what time do you guys get up at?