Today's Friday Five

1. What are the first things that you do in the morning to start your day?
On a workday? Why am I asking... this time of year every day is a worday for me. Turn off the alarm, assuming it has rung. Usually it doesn't, no matter how little sleep I've gotten--and these days, a "night's" sleep is 4-5 hours. Feed the cat and clean her litter box. Shower, wash my hair, and dress. Pack a lunch. Then off to the CTA train station for another wonderful morning's commute. I really, *really* miss working on North Michigan Avenue where the office was one pleasant bus ride away from home.

2. What are the last things that you do at night before going to bed?
I've normally spent the early evening either working, scanning, or taping, and updating webpages (much less often than I need to). So it's quite often midnight before I can check e-mail and ftp any webpage changes. FTP usually gets done first, the personal e-mail, then list mail. I'm mostly ignoring my skating lists these days in favor of LotR lists. While I'm downloading mail and/or FTPing, I usually start my ritual of checking the cat's box, taking my vitamins and melatonin, undressing and washing my face. If I have any large downloads scheduled in Star Downloader (a program I highly recommend), I will usually do those while I am reading listmail since it takes up pretty much all my bandwidth. If there's a new installment of the latest Lily Baggins story, I try to save that for last so I turn off the computer with a smile on my face.

3. What daily routine have you recently added to your day?
Boy, that depends on how you define "recently." I suppose the newst thing is doing the Friday Five, although that's only once a week. I would *like* to start updating this blog daily instead of several times a week.

4. What routine do you wish to get rid of?
Well, I think this will be my last cat for many years, as it's too worrisome and expensive to travel as much as I do and find decent catsitters, etc. But I don't begrudge the routine for now. I wish I didn't spend so much at Ebay, and so wouldn't have to check my bids, but since I don't want to stop buying what I'm buying, that really doesn't work either. I guess the one thing I do on a daily basis that I hate the most is that part of my commute that sees me scurrying through a dark, smelly, damp underground tunnel in downtown Chicago, when I change train lines. I loathe that.

5. What's the one thing that makes you feel like something is missing if you don't do it some point within your day?
Checking my e-mail. Sometimes when I work 16-18 hour days, I just can't bring myself to do it, knowing that even if I ignore almost all of it, it will still take over an hour. And then all the next day I wonder what I've missed, and dread seeing those hundreds and hundreds of messages waiting for me when I *do* log on.