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Monday, January 11, 2010

The pleasures and pains of bedtime browsing

I go to bed at about midnight and my alarm startles me awake at 5.30 every morning.  I have precious little time to getup, get the boys up, feed them, boss them around enough that they get a shower, clean their teeth, etc, and get myself into a presentable enough shape to drive them to school by 7.20.  It's a marathon but it all gets done.   Before I even start all that though, I procrastinate for about 15 minutes using my iPhone snooze feature until at 5.45 I can justify it no longer and I am forced to rise and begin the routine.   That 15 minutes snoozing is not all lost time however.  Most mornings, I place the iPhone about 2 inches from my eyeballs (I am very shortsighted) and I start my browsing after the first snooze alarm goes off. In about 10 minutes I can grasp the essence of the day, at least from an external perspective.  I know what the world is worrying about and I can get a sense of what my be hot on the  Today Show, should I have time to tune in to that later.  My first port of call is gmail so I can check overnight messages (new alerts, desperate notes from clients, cheesy ads for department stores, and tables of contents for various journals), followed by Facebook, Twitter, and finally AP world news headlines.  If I have time, I might look at my local paper, TheDay, but usually, I leave that until after coffee and the morning walk with the dog.   So these are the pleasures of early morning browsing without leaving the cozy confines of my bed.
So what are the pains?  Just lately I have been feeling a kind of agony in my right arm as I lift it to hang laundry, or drag my handbag from the back seat of the car to the front.  It's not the first time this has happened and I usually find plenty of things to blame it on but this time, I have a feeling it is my own fault.  I do believe my wrenching arm pain is not merely a sign of growing old but rather a consequence of my early morning forays into cyberspace.  So far, it is not enough to stop me, and as long as I can stand the pain I will try to alert readers to what I deem important news of the day, albeit from the sleepy pre-dawn repose of my bed.

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