I'VE BEEN A BAD, BAD GIRL

My family is not going to be happy with me when they get up - especially those who are sleeping downstairs (or trying to, anyway). You see, according to my daughter, when someone moves around up here - even if they tiptoe - it sounds like a herd of marching elephants to those downstairs. And I have done a lot of tiptoeing around this morning. A whole lot.

First, there was the usual shuffling around in the kitchen, getting a pot of tea made and setting the steel cut oats to simmering. Then there was tripping over John's laptop cord in the dark about six times, which he left draped across the path to my sunrise meditation spot, and barely catching it each time before it flew off the table.

Just as I got settled into my chair with a steaming mug of blood orange tea, it occurred to me that I really should be sipping it from one of my lovely winter-greenery mugs, but of course, that whole set of dishes needed to be run through the dishwasher before I could start using them again. Plus, they were in a cabinet that will be really hard to reach once the boys set the tree up later today. So, it only made sense to begin pulling them out of the living room cabinet, right then and there, at 5:45 AM, and transferring them to the dishwasher. Which led to pulling a bunch of dishes out of the kitchen cabinet, so I'd have a more accessible place to put the others once they were clean.

Then, of course, I had to find a place to store those non-winter dishes, and decided that if I'd just go ahead and pull out my Christmas teapots and snow-globes from under the kitchen hutch, I'd have plenty of room to store the spare dishes there. Ahhh. So glad I simplified recently, by purging my dishes down to the barest essentials. Aren't you? Now that all that is taken care of, I'm ready to snuggle in, focus on the sunrise, and sink into my morning meditataion.

But wait, what is that noise? Do I hear people shuffling around and slamming doors downstairs? What on earth are they all doing, getting up at the crack of dawn? Don't they know how important it is for me to have my quiet time each morning? I swear, some people!