DAYLIGHT SAVING AND THAT ONE CROWDED HOUR

Daylight Saving knocks me around. I can never get beyond a feeling of being rushed and running on empty. I know people love it and livin...

Daylight Saving knocks me around. I can never get beyond a feeling of being rushed and running on empty.

www.katiecrackernuts.blogspot.com.au || sleeping in disappears with daylight saving time

I know people love it and living on the coast, you’d think I’d have grown to love it too. I’m going to try and embrace it this year. I’ve been thinking I’ll use that time in the evening to take a walk and listen to a podcast or perhaps spend an hour in the garden. You can do a lot with an hour in the garden a few times a day. I thought I might even drive to the beach and take an evening dip when the weather gets warmer.

I’ve been thinking about routines a lot of late. I was telling a friend this week the routine I have to juggle full-time study, part-time work and the regular stuff - like running a household, keeping a garden, keeping up with family and making time for the grandkidlets - has meant keeping a tight rein on the diary. I plan things that should be spontaneous weeks, if not months, in advance. An overseas holiday to Malaysia, for example, was booked in February for September. I had to sync the plan with a uni schedule that meant finishing an exam on the Friday, flying Saturday, returning the following Sunday and showing up for the next trimester’s course work on the Monday. That trip was five weeks ago and I still haven’t downloaded my holiday pics.

Friends and family phone and ask whether I am studying before diving in for a natter. Often I am, but I hate friends feel they have to apologise for cutting into my day. The truth is I want them to. Online study is a pretty lonely and isolating experience. I see much, much more of my study and a computer screen than I’d like to.

And even though my routine has “very little fat in it” it’s so completely different to routines I’ve kept in the past. The full-time commuting routine meant getting up at 5am every day, travelling two hours each way and cramming 'something' into every little moment of available time in the evenings before crashing on Friday night to gingerly resurface on Sunday.

And that was completely different to the routine of having children at home and keeping up with grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, dropping kid off and picking them up and making sure the family hummed along, happy and harmonious (or something close to that). My sister and brother-in-law are firmly in that routine right now and it’s hard. I spent a week with them last month and my life is a luxury of time compared to that routine.

Whatever the routine, I am amazed how we learn to adjust and adapt. I am watching while one of my stepdaughters prepares to bring a second child into the world, and I marvel at how she and her partner, and the whole family, will expand to absorb the new.

And speaking of new routines, Daylight Saving and summer, can you believe it’s October and about 12 weeks until Christmas and the end of the year? My head hurts at what’s got to be done at work and for my MBA before then.

  • If you’re game to add a weekend away to your scheduling crisis, come play at Jamboree with me. Last I saw there were still a handful of tickets left.
  • 12 weeks until Christmas freaks me out. There’s just not enough making time, but I still really want to do this ornament swap. I am telling myself no, but you could sign up.

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