My boss agreed (reluctantly) that we could start operations and telephone monitoring later in the morning from now on. Best news I've had all summer. With an extra hour's sleep I feel much more human. His reluctance stems more from his personal anxiety than any rational evaluation of operational needs.

It's wonderful being able to wake up at 5:15 instead of 4:15. It seems so much more like morning than the middle of the night. I am reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson's poem that starts like this:

"In winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candlelight.
In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day."
It's from A Child's Garden of Verses, an early childhood memory.

I've always wondered why we have to be so rigid about work time. Why couldn't start time of schools and businesses adjust to the yearly shift of the sun? We could be so much more in tune with our natural circadian rhythms.

And while I'm asking about diurnal schedules, why on earth do teenagers have to be in school by 7:30 a.m.? Is there some kind of virtue acquired by forcing them to get up and out so early? I don't know a single teen who wouldn't benefit from an extra hour's sleep.