Still dark outside...

I love getting up early, but sometimes I miss the summer when it isn't so dark outside. Sometimes it's a little bit odd to see the night sky when I take the dogs out, but I do love looking at the stars and searching for that elusive shooting star. And since I tend to keep farmer's hours and go to bed long before everyone else does, the winter mornings are the time for me to do my star searching. I need to give myself some kind of reminder to take my phone outside and use that Google app so I can learn the names of the constellations I'm seeing. Maybe a big post-it on the door will do the trick. So now here I sit waiting for the sun to come up and catching up on blogs I read and email and message boards, listening to the dogs bicker over who's getting which bone, and enjoying my coffee.

This week I start my new temporary (hopefully only for January) work schedule of 3 days a week (I had Monday off and today off). It was 4 days a week for November and December. That was nice and I was OK with the pay hit in exchange for the time off. This month I think will be a bit tougher. It's hard to get a good work groove going when it's in one day, out one day. But I'm going to try to make the best of the extra time off and find creative ways to save money so that the pay hit doesn't feel so bad. I know in these times that I need to be grateful that I have a job. I need to be grateful that even though I'm not working as much, I don't have to be out there looking for a new one (at least not yet). And that even though my hours have been reduced, they are still covering my health insurance. So I will look at this as an opportunity to cultivate some of the habits/projects I have on my list for 2011 and do my best to look on the bright side of this gift of extra time.