Learn something new every day. Or seven somethings.

Things I learned in the course of a single morning:

1) It’s always worth getting off the couch and going to bed when you’re super tired. Thinking that you’re too tired to move at any particular moment and yet awake enough to get to bed at some point is not logical.

Getting off the couch and into bed is even more important if any (ar all) of the following are certainties:

You move around in your sleep and you’ll roll off the couch. More than once even. And yet manage, bizarrely, to get back on the couch instead of making the apparently impossible effort of stumbling down the hall to your actual bed.

Big puppy will eventually worm her way onto the couch whilst you’re sleeping. Heaven forbid that you remain unguarded in the apparently dangerous living room.

Small puppy, determined to NOT miss out on anything that big puppy is into will also sleep on the couch. ‘Cept he’ll walk on you on his way to the top of the back of the couch. The back of the couch being a spot that at some point, naturally, he will fall from. That point being the point at which you are so soundly asleep that it is likely that you’ll wake up flailing arms and screaming.

Screaming blue bloody murder in the middle of the night is no guarantee that anyone will come to your rescue. At the most you’ll get irritated glares from two dogs. Don’t tell me dogs don’t glare, they totally do.

2) If three different things (your clothes, your friends and the scales) all say you’ve lost weight, but looking in the mirror makes you feel ginormous, don’t look in the mirror. Duh.


3) Preserves made in January for delivery in December should be labeled in, oh, I don’t know, January? NOT the morning of delivery in December.

4) Doing something drastic to your hair (shaving your head, streaking it blue, trimming it with pinking shears) when you’re upset may be your way of coping with stress. But…doing it the day before you may be going out for lunch is just asking for trouble.

5) Being up early means you can take your time getting ready. Which should be taken to mean…have a bath. Do your hair. Put some make-up on? It does NOT mean change your hair entirely, bake something for the office, and decide to make a supper that involves peeling, chopping, browning, sauce making and a slow cooker. Because at some point you’ll realize that you’re behind time, not ahead of it.

6) Don’t wear underpinnings so complex they’ll make you late for work.


7) Stupid people aren’t any smarter first thing in the morning. Au contraire – it’s entirely possible that they’re even stupider than usual in the cold light of dawn. I’m not saying they'll get smarter as the day goes on, of course. I’m just saying that if you’re hoping they’ll be more on top of things at eight in the morning than they were at four in the afternoon the day before...that’s just wishful thinking.