I noticed I haven’t complained about something in a couple of posts … which yes, is really unlike me, but … but I felt like there really wasn’t anything worth complaining about to y’all.  Nothing that deserved the complaints.  Nope … nothing.  Nothing at all.

Nothing …

Alright, daylight, you win.

Here I was thinking I could get through the entire summer where I wouldn’t ever want to complain about the daylight hours, with all that nonsense of getting constant dark; and I thought there wouldn’t be anything to complain about

… well played daylight, well played.

I am dragging my butt around every morning feeling like I got just a few hours of sleep, needing gallons of coffee to get the motor going, then finally feeling I can sleep for hours the next night I lie in bed or on the couch not feeling all that tired.

Summer solstice still lies ten days away, and until then, we continue to gain daylight hours (or minutes at this point).  Make no mistake, there are LOADS of daylight hours.  The stats:

June 11th — Sunrise at 4:25AM — Sunset at 11:37PM — Total Daylight 19 hours, 12 minutes (a gain of 1 minute, 58 seconds over yesterday)

What I can’t mention enough is that you can’t just go off of the daylight hours.  Don’t sit there and say “well you still get four hours 48 minutes of night”, because … well … we don’t!  There is a value called “Civil Twilight” which represents approximately when the sky goes dark in the evening until when the sky goes light in the morning (or how much real “nighttime” you get).  During the winter, its pretty close to the sun up and down.  This is because when the sun is down, it’s ALL the way down and things go black until the sun is ready to make its next appearance.  Right now, even though the sun drops below the horizon, it peaks up at as from just across the landscape.  It hides there, and keeps its light coming our way like a little kid just out of sight singing “neener neener”.  By the numbers, this means the Civil Twilight officially is “null” … in other words, IT IS ALWAYS DAYLIGHT in Anchorage.

It’s so strange when you aren’t used to it; and strange on how it seemingly snuck up on me.  I would roll over and wake up briefly and see the morning bright and alive – then look over to the clock to see it’s 2AM.   Or when I fall asleep on the couch, and have to shuffle my feet back to bed — and I don’t have to turn a light on in the hallway to get there … and that’s when you realize that you haven’t turned the lights on in that hallway in months.

This all leaves me tired, tired alot.  Granted, my “hibernation weight” isn’t helping my sleep patterns and I get way too many early morning teleconferences, but the motor isn’t starting that well this week.