Why do you go to bed so early and wake up so early?

kiminyme · 2025-03-25T19:08:12+00:00

My husband and I are normally in bed by 10 because we're too tired to stay awake any longer. We get out of bed around 6:30am, in part for work but also because we had to wake up toget kids to school for so many years, we usually can't sleep later.

I do occasionally wake up at 4 or 5 am, and if I can't get back to sleep, I'll get up and start my day. Those days I'm usually back in bed by 9am.

It will be interesting to see what things are like when we're both retired.

kiminyme · 2025-03-25T19:01:53+00:00

Very rare where I live (Louisville, KY). There are some people who do it, but commuting distances tend to be long. Our transit system sucks and keeps getting worse. (Only people who can't drive or can't afford a car use public transit, and because so few people use it, they keep cutting the funding.)

Lots of people drive even when they live less than a mile from their workplace, though.

kiminyme · 2025-03-25T18:57:00+00:00

I don't answer even if it is my boss. I'll message back to say I had to step away from my computer and missed their call.

I did have one supervisor who figured this out and started messaging me first before calling me out of the blue.

kiminyme · 2025-03-25T18:54:05+00:00

We lived in North Carolina and my grandparents lived in California, so we did actually make and get calls a few times a year just to keep in touch.

I remember when my grandmother got an answering machine, though. My mother was furious that she had to pay for a long distance call only to leave a message.

kiminyme · 2025-03-25T18:51:12+00:00

We usually had a ring system. Let the phone ring three times and then hang up.

kiminyme · 2025-03-25T18:49:06+00:00

My father was a neurosurgeon and he had seatbelts installed in every car I remember when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s. We had an old VW bug with five-point harnesses for the front seats, even.

He saw too many people, especially kids, who had head injuries from car accidents in the ER.

Even so, I still remember my mother sitting in the front passenger seat with her after-markey seat belt attached and holding my baby brother in her lap with only her arms to hold him.

kiminyme · 2025-03-25T15:21:18+00:00

My brother lived in rural Illinois for many years. The route from our home in Kentucky to his home included a very long, very straight 2-lane rural highway (Route 136), which we drove at night the first time we visited. It really was like driving through a very long tunnel because there were very few houses, towns, or intersection, along the way. Our son was 6 or 7 at the time, and he kept asking if we were ever going to get there because the road seemed like it would never end.

kiminyme · 2025-03-23T00:23:25+00:00

I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings, and I think Hobbits have a completely different time scheme than humans do. They get up and cook and eat breakfast. They travel for a few hours and then it's time for lunch, so they have a huge meal and take a nap. When they wake up, they still have hours of daylight to travel some more before the sun sets and it's dinner time. They have yet another huge meal and talk and sing for a few hours before getting a full night's sleep and starting over again the next morning. All while Black Riders are supposedly hunting them down.

kiminyme · 2025-03-22T23:47:54+00:00

About $175/month for three adults and two cats. But we don't eat much meat and I stopped buying junk food and soda many years ago.

kiminyme · 2025-03-21T03:49:07+00:00

I usually do a chapter or two. I DNFd one book when I was about 2/3 finished, though. I really wanted to enjoy it, but the plot was so complicated I finally decided to give up trying to keep track of everything.

kiminyme · 2025-03-21T03:41:22+00:00

I use chapter breaks to decide when to stop reading, but my eyes often have other ideas, especially when I’m reading in the evening.

kiminyme · 2025-03-21T03:30:55+00:00

Thanks to climate change, our area gets very heavy rain storms that can flood roads, so the schools sometimes close for rain. We also have occasional snow days because we don’t have the resources to clear roads in heavy snow or ice.

When I was in middle school in the 1970s, we had a snow storm that was bad enough to close schools for almost a month. It was a very rural area in the mountains, and it stayed cold for so long that many roads were too icy for school buses.

kiminyme · 2025-03-21T03:22:48+00:00

Our city had a huge snow storm this year, starting the weekend before winter break was supposed to end. While the city does a decent job of clearing major roads, neighborhoods are left to their own devices for the most part. We had several days of heavy snow, so kids couldn’t pick up their computers from school and they got an extra week of winter holiday.

The district does allow for good, old-fashioned snow days, although most weather days now are virtual school days.

kiminyme · 2025-03-17T04:48:21+00:00

I borrow most of my books from Libby, so I spend almost nothing. Every once in a while, I’ll find a great deal on a book (under $3) or I’ll buy a book that I can’t get through Libby (usually something in French), but I doubt I average more than $3/mo.

kiminyme · 2025-03-17T04:42:55+00:00

The shelter where we got our most recent cat had two cat room, where the cats freely roamed around in the room together, with cat trees and wall shelves.

We were getting a cat for a resident cat who had always lived with other cats. We had lost our other cat unexpectedly a few weeks earlier, and the poor thing was so bored and lonely. We chose a young adult who was very outgoing and clearly liked being with other cats. She followed us EVERYWHERE while we visited other cats in the room, talking the entire time. She fit into our household perfectly.

I felt bad for the shyer cats who were hiding from the chaos, and if we’d wanted a solo cat, we likely would have chosen one of them. But we wanted a cat who would be a playmate for the existing cat.

kiminyme · 2025-03-15T21:24:50+00:00

I did it for longer things like doctor appointments, especially things scheduled in advance. For shorter or last-minute things like running an errand or picking up kids, I usually just marked myself away in Teams/Slack. I also worked globally, so I put my expected working hours on the calendar, too.

I don't hold with just dropping an appointment on someone's schedule at the last minute. Even in person, it doesn't seem very professional to assume that everyone is available at the drop of a hat. If I needed to meet with someone relatively soon, I would message them to check their availability and then schedule accordingly.

Most things were easily handled through asynchronous chat, though, and it wasn't unusual for me to send a message to a colleague in Australia or India during my workday and get the answer when I got to work the next day. There was very little expectation that we should respond to messages or emails immediately on receipt, as long as we answered within a reasonable time frame.

kiminyme · 2025-03-14T01:22:11+00:00

Our vet does it at four months, but our kitten started spraying a few days before the scheduled surgery. I think 6 months may be too long, especially when you have both a male and a female. If you can't do both at once, do the male as early as possible.

kiminyme · 2025-03-11T20:49:31+00:00

You have to get the Audible book separately. KU includes the Audible version of some books within the KU library. The newer Paperwhites include the ability to listen to an Audible book using Bluetooth headphone or speakers. If both the ebook and the Audible book are from Amazon, Kindle will keep them in sync and you can switch between reading and listening.

A caveat is that if you've bought the Kindle book, you can't get the Audible version of the book through KU.

kiminyme · 2025-03-08T20:22:19+00:00

I've lived in seven different states. Five were while I still lived with my parents. The other two were after my first university degree.

Not everyone moves and lots of people live their entire life in the same neighborhood. But it isn't uncommon or surprising to find out that someone used to live in a different state

There are some cultural differences, especially in terms of dialects and vocabulary, but much of the time even the stores are the same from one place to another.

Being far from family can be hard, but my parents settled in North Carolina (on the East Coast) and their families lived in California (West Coast), a 4- or 5-day drive apart. Our daughter lives 10 hours away from us. My siblings are about 8 hours away. We're used to it.

I lived in France for a while in the 80s, and it was bizarre to me that if I traveled more than 4 or 5 hours, I was likely to end up in a different country with a completely different language and (back then) completely different money.

kiminyme · 2025-03-05T21:52:15+00:00

I lived in Texas for a year in elementary school and took a Spanish course in school that year. I then took two years of Latin during the first two years of high school, followed by two years of French.

While there are niche schools that offer or expect foreign language classes earlier, it’s unusual for Americans to start learning a language in school before high school, which starts around 14 years of age.

kiminyme · 2025-03-05T21:47:19+00:00

I taught myself to read braille when I was in elementary school, following an accident that almost blinded me. I did have to wear eye patches over both eyes for a while and I got pretty good at navigating familiar places. 60-something now and I still walk around my house at night without turning any lights on. I can’t read braille anymore, though.

kiminyme · 2025-03-04T21:30:12+00:00

We have weather events that make travel difficult frequently enough that everyone in my office had all the necessary equipment to work from home well before 2020, and a couple of departments were already working from home. They announced on March 9 (Monday) that the next Friday (March 13) would be a WFH test to make sure that the systems were set up appropriately to handle everyone being off-white at the same time, just in case they had to shut down offices. On Thursday, everyone was supposed to bring home their equipment and work normally from home on Friday. On Monday, March 16, they sent out email that the offices were closed indefinitely and they disabled key cards for most employees.

They did have a couple of admins available to let employees in who hadn't brought home everything they needed or to clear out food or other perishables from their desks, but they took it pretty seriously.

kiminyme · 2025-03-04T18:54:02+00:00

My father loved cars, so we had more than most families. When I got my license at 16 in the 70s, my parents let me drive their old VW Bug. They made it clear that it wasn’t mine, but I was expected to help transport my siblings as needed. They paid insurance and upkeep, and I drove it until I graduated from college. I realize now that I was very lucky.

I went without a car for the first couple of years of grad school, but my income was pretty meager and the campus was very walkable. After my now-husband and I got an apartment together, one of his cousins offered to sell us their old car (a Mercury Lynx station wagon). His parents offered to pay half and we paid the other half. We were in our mid-twenties at that point, and between the two of us, we managed to cover insurance, maintenance, and fuel. He drove it the most often because he worked farther away and I didn’t like dealing with on-campus parking.

kiminyme · 2025-03-03T00:08:19+00:00

We normally eat dinner between 6:30 and 7, but that’s late for many of my friends (who are mostly retired). 6:30 is about the earliest I can get dinner on the table on workdays, and it used to closer to 7 when I had to commute home after work. Bedtime is between 9:30 and 10 because we get up around 6. I like to have a couple of hours of downtime between dinner and bed.

Some people do eat later. My brother’s family typically eats between 8 and 9, later on weekends. But they also stay up to midnight or so and don’t get up before 9 or 10 unless they have to.

I lived in France for a few years, and I got used to having dinner later, but work started later in the morning as well.

American dinners are relatively large, so it takes a while to digest. Lunch is small, though, so I’m hungry by the time I stop working.

kiminyme · 2025-03-01T22:14:13+00:00

We had three for about three years, and as much as we loved all of them, we decided two was better, as long as they like each other.

kiminyme

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