There's something about fresh morning air that just makes me sick

Heaven save me; it’s soooooo early. I could throw up, it’s so early.

I’m a night person, you see. I stay up until 4 AM and sleep until noon, then work from 1-9 PM. Every day.  It was magical...until last week, when the university decided that during the summer the library would close at 6 PM on Fridays.  Now I have to be here by 10, which means I have to wake up at the unholy hour of 9 AM.

I can normally handle that; it's only one day a week.  But today is the day the contractor came by to put a new roof on our house. After about 6:00 AM I startled awake every three minutes, certain that I’d hear a knock at the door at any moment that would set the dogs into howling, foaming-at-the-mouth projectiles. After about an hour of nothing actually happening, I gave up and dragged my groggy self out of bed. The dogs were ecstatic that I was up so early. They're always so happy, no matter how early it is.  I could have kicked them.

The roofers showed up at 7:30, but I had to stay awake and wait for their supervisor to arrive. I wasn’t going to write a $5,000 check to the first guy in a toolbelt who walked by.

Now I’m at work, and I could not be unhappier about it. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and I should still be in bed with the blackout curtains nailed to the wall to shut out the daylight. Mornings are for sleeping through. At least I got to see a squirrel and a mockingbird have words on my way in today. That made me smile, despite the unnatural morning brightness.

Still not as bad of a morning as one Saturday about 2 years ago, when my husband and brother-in-law decided to start a rubber fire in the kitchen at 7AM and sing two different songs very poorly at the tops of their lungs. I got up after twenty minutes of fragmented nightmares about them deep-frying cats, certain they’d set the house on fire and gone mad from the fumes.

I was almost afraid to leave my room.  What if they really had gone insane?  What if I found them rain-dancing through the house in their tightey-whiteys, faces covered in peanut-butter-and-jelly warpaint and setting random pieces of furniture on fire? 

But no.  They were delighted to see me up and about at that ungodly hour and offered me some of their half-burned culinary abortion. They claimed it was Mexican food, which is, in my opinion, just as unacceptable to cook at 7AM as the sofa. I threatened them with death if they did not SHUT THE HELL UP AND OPEN A F*#%ING WINDOW!! 

They found that amusing.

I don’t think they realized how serious the situation was; I am a mean, nasty person in the mornings, no matter how gently I am woken up (hence my predisposition to sleep through them). Being startled awake by a tone-deaf sing fight and the pungent aroma of burning Teflon did nothing to alleviate that, shockingly. I may have appeared groggy and slow, but I could barely see straight from all the rage. I was seriously one off-key country song away from making the news. When they turned away and started singing again, I just went to work early. I figured it was better than prison.

Yay, it’s Friday!!