Early Wake Up Calls

After living together for a whopping 10 days, I'm already predicting what our two main points of contention will be:

1. doing dishes

2. hitting the snooze button

Dan and I have different philosophies when it comes to doing dishes. Thanks to my mother, I insist on putting dishes in the dishwasher as soon as I'm done eating (at least when I'm not living alone). With pots/other things that need to be hand washed (which in my book is only pots, and only if they don't fit in the dishwasher…), I fill them with water and soap and leave them, but always wash before I go to bed. 

Dan puts dishes somewhere in the vicinity of the sink...and normally washes everything within 24 hours. He doesn't like hand washing anything until he's got enough to make it worth filling up the sink with soap and water and doing some intense washing. I'm more of a squirt some dish soap on the sponge and scrub clean kind of person.

I think I'll just have to become more relaxed about dishes going in the dishwasher right away...as long as Dan doesn't expect me to be all super-dishwasher for the hand wash stuff. A sponge works just fine as far as I'm concerned.

The snooze button is another story. Dan is not a morning person, in any stretch of the imagination. If given his way, he'd probably sleep from like 2am-noon every day. That obviously doesn't work with real life, especially with his job. His regular hours at Lewis are from 7:30am-5:30pm Monday through Saturday. And he has to commute an hour to get there. That means leaving the apartment between 6:15 and 6:30 depending on his first launch time. As I observed this morning, part of his morning routine involves sitting down for a couple of bowls of cereal while reading Time Magazine, which takes as long as it takes me to shower, if not longer.

I've managed to master getting out of the apartment in about 30 minutes in the morning. It involves not doing my hair whenever possible, picking out clothes the night before, packing my lunch the night before, and basically just having everything ready to go in the morning. I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually eaten breakfast at home, oatmeal in a coffee mug at work has totally replaced that. I don't have to be at work (at least during this rotation) really until 8:30 but I try to get in around 8 so I can leave closer to 4:30 than 5. That means I get up around 7-a full 1.5 hours after Dan's phone doesn't just ring, but blares poor quality, very loud music at least three times over-and that's just the individual alarms, not counting the snooze buttons!

Since he's on summer hours now, it’s not quite as bad, but at some point we'll have to figure out a routine. He'll start his regular schedule next week, and I just can't deal with the early wake-up call, especially since I won't always be going to bed with him at 10:30 or 11. Dan is also allergic to the word routine, whereas I would marry my combined outlook-google calendar if I could figure out a way.

As much as I don't want to admit it, I think the best solution is me getting up at 5:30 with him. This would be great if I were still working out in the mornings (for awhile I was hooked on a 6am workout class twice a week and would run another two weekday mornings), but this is a little more complicated because I have every intention of getting rid of my car so that will increase the amount of time required to get to the gym in the mornings (running takes 15 minutes aka leaving about 5:40 and I really don't want to do that in the dark). I could potentially go to a 5:30am class and take Dan's car...but that involves getting up a full 2 hours earlier than I really need to for work, not sure I can handle that. Clearly this will take a little more brainstorming...and I definitely have the incentive to figure it out quickly since I have zero desire to listen to his alarms go off every morning! Although, I may just start kicking him out of bed at the first alarm. I'll certainly be interested to see how often he's late for work though...my guess is it won't be a rare occurrence.