4:15am — Coding time

I awoke with a start, the room was dark and all was quiet. I heard the TV on in the other room but pre­sumed K had just fallen asleep with it on. I lis­tened and could hear Mat­tie in her cage, and it struck me that I didn’t take her out before bed. She would be near­ing 8 hours with­out a trip out­side. Usu­ally not an issue, but she had eaten since going out. I feared the worst, think­ing she had had an acci­dent in the cage.

My sinuses have been clogged and even with­out that my sense of smell is iffy, so I couldn’t smell any­thing but I got up and pulled on jeans and a shirt. I retrieved Mattie’s leash and took her out for a quick walk. She did her busi­ness and when I got back inside I checked the cage to find it clean — thank goodness.

After putting Mat­tie back into the cage I crawled back into bed and pro­ceeded to toss and turn for half an hour. Finally I gave up try­ing to fall asleep and got up. While in bed my brain had been crunch­ing over a few cod­ing issues with a project for Man­a­Na­tion. I trawled my RSS feeds for any­thing of inter­est and I scanned my forums, most hadn’t had any post since I went to bed just 7 hours ago.

I set­tled in to work on the code and sure enough, the early hour, the quiet email and twit­ter, and the quiet house allowed me to really dig into the work and lay down some qual­ity progress on the project.

It was extremely refresh­ing since, when I went to bed last night, I was fum­ing with frus­tra­tion over another project. I take cod­ing very per­son­ally and if I can’t solve a prob­lem, or if some­thing I do con­tin­ues to be an issue, I get extremely upset. So to get up and in the early hours knock out two hours of solid progress on a project is a great boost to my morale.