I Have Always Been An Early Bird

Weekly Prompts Weekend Challenge – Morning

SMIRK

The Friday Reminder for #SoCS & #JusJoJan 2021 Daily Prompt – Jan. 16th

Your prompt for #JusJoJan and Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “first thing.” Start your post with the words, “first thing” and go from there. Bonus points if you end your post with the last thing. Have fun!

The first thing I do every morning now is pet Annie. She is typically on her bed beside me. Sometimes she is outside because the squirrels or other critters have alerted her to there presence. I assess my pain level to decide what I will be doing that day. I have to be honest that I often smirk at the knowledge that I don’t need to get up and prepare for work. Once retiring, it didn’t take long for me to not jump up and get dressed for work. It makes every day seem like a weekend.

At first I thought every day of retirement would feel like a holiday, but that isn’t the case. If it was holiday I would be spending time going places and seeing things and spending money. Even before Covid, that was not my style.

I am a morning person. I try to get something done every day early in the morning. Annie MUST be fed and played with of course. If I complete a chore before playing with Annie she lets me know that she does not approve. She stretches her body and does this weird yawn noise to get my attention. It is totally my fault, because once I retired I didn’t have to wait until coming home from school to play with her. She has me well trained.   

I am happy that I have learned that if I do absolutely nothing, that is OK too. It just isn’t my norm. My day almost always includes time in my yard. I spend time watering, weeding, planting, etc. I have turned off the sprinklers because they waste too much water. Instead, I hand water the plants and trees in my planters. I have let both lawns die out. At some point, I will figure out what I want to do with them. 

Getting out of the house first thing in the morning is an advantage right now. When I need to go  grocery shopping, I can be at the store when they open for senior hours. With the horrible numbers in LA County, I have amped up my safety precautions. I went to two stores yesterday morning and was on my way home in 30 minutes. I am back to wearing gloves and tossing them too. By 9 AM, I had laundry done, groceries in quarantine or decontaminated as best I could, played with Annie, and watered my plants.  I already felt like I had accomplished a great deal. 

I wondered if I would change from a morning person once I retired. I didn’t. But then, I have been a morning person my entire life.