Yawn

I'm feeling a little out of sorts lately. It's probably the spring time return of early morning sun. My body clock seems to have switched to a 6 am wake up, every morning, regardless of what time I go to bed.

The lack of daylight saving in Brisbane and the nearby coast can really play havoc with sleep. Years ago, I was living in a place where a particular wild bird used to start every summer morning with its loud and distinctive call at the very crack of dawn. Seriously, it was not when the sun rose (which is early enough - as you can see from this table, it's 4.45 am for a good few weeks of November and December) but just as soon as there was some vague brightening in the sky. (Actually, that table I just linked to includes listings for "civil twilight start", which might indicate roughly the time the bird started its call. You can see it's 4.19 am in November and December.) The call would continue for about 20 minutes, then stop. I never heard it again during the day.

Can you imagine how annoying it is to be woken for 20 minutes at 4.20 - 4.45 for about 3 months of the year? It was impossible to sleep through. I occasionally took to trying to throw things into the neighbour's tree that it seemed to live in, but it was just out of range. I never identified what the bird was, and now I have forgotten the exact sound it made.

In my books, going to bed after 10 pm is not all that radical an idea. In fact, I have routinely been about a 11 - 12 pm sleeper for about as long as I can remember. If you can sleep in til 6 to 7 am, that's fine. But 4.30 - that's ridiculous.

I don't have too big a problem with birds where I live at the moment. Instead, it's the stupid young adults in the house behind me that like to sit outside at 2 am (or, this last Sunday morning, 5 am) and have loud conversations. Their entertainment area is hidden from view from our bedroom window behind some palms, but they seem to think that if you can't see them you can't hear them. I recently wrote to the parents about it and (to their credit) did get a call of apology for what their sons and friends do. The number of times we have heard them late on a weekend night has decreased a little since then, as has the volume of conversation, but now it seems to be on the way up again. I wish them misery from noisy inconsiderate young people when they have reached my age.

Then, this morning, at 12.45am, someone let a bunch of fireworks off somewhere near the house. It was "cracker" type, perhaps left over from Chinatown, but the only house which may have Chinese neighbours mostly seems to be in darkness. There was no sign of who let them off when I looked at the window. No sound of laughing or anything. I don't think they were aimed at my house in particular, and I heard a neighbour's door opening to see what was going on. Strange.