Shameful

I stayed up until 5 a.m. and didn't get out of bed until noon.  By the time I put on my robe and went outside to get the paper, it was one in the afternoon.  My neighbor drove up and stopped her car in front of me.  She said, "shameful!" but I knew she was teasing me.  All my friends know not to call me before noon.

It is so nice to be able to go to sleep when you want to and get up when you're not sleepy any more.  That's one of the best things about being retired.

I stayed up so late because I've been cleaning my office.  When I was working, I didn't have time to go through my files, and things were getting so crowded, I couldn't put anything more in the file cabinets, so I'd just put a rubber band around my papers, and throw them in the plastic bin in the closet.  Then the bin got too full, so I put the rubber-banded bundles beside the bin.

My cousin recently moved, and she told me how much stuff she'd been throwing out, and that inspired me to start de-cluttering.  Once I get started on a project, it's hard to stop just because it's one in the morning.  I looked at the clock, and it was two hours later.  Then it was two more hours, and that's how I went to bed at 5 in the morning.

I'm a night owl and always have been.  My mother told me she used to hold a mirror up to my face when I was a baby sleeping in the crib.  I slept so long, she worried that I wasn't breathing any more.  I saw that scene played out with Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment.  I wonder if the author knew my mom.