sprinklefingers

oh, lord have mercy, i’m so tired. and i have only me to blame.

i’m not exactly sure if this is freakish or very handy, but, i can wake myself up at the same time each day without the use of an alarm clock.

it’s true.

i’m 99.9% positive i inherited this ‘gift’ from my father. that guy NEVER set an alarm clock. back when i was a teen (who had not a care in the world) i thought his internal alarm was so completely annoying…because the damn thing went off at like 5 am and once dad was up, everyone was up. grrr.

and now that internal alarm has planted itself firmly in my head…waking me up at (almost exactly) 5:15 am every day. (while the early-to-rise time is annoying, i do appreciate that there’s no need for an alarm clock on my bedside table. not being one for clutter, it really fits in with my design aesthetic. see! there is a bright side - even when getting up early is involved!)

and in taking this internal alarm thing a little bit further, i also have an internal snooze button. if i wake up at 5:15 and i’m not quite ready to get out of bed, i simply say to myself, “wake back up in 10 minutes.” i fall back asleep and then, no fooling, i magically wake back up 10 minutes later. i’m pretty sure if i was in a pageant, i would use this internal alarm business as my talent. because, seriously, who can deny the power of an internal alarm?

but the problem is, no matter what time i go to bed at night, my internal alarm still wakes me up at 5:15. so, this morning, i’m a little bit tired because i didn’t go to bed last night until after 10. i tried to go to bed earlier, but i got a txt message at 10 questioning bon appetite magazine’s (ridiculous) decision to put GP on the june cover…that kept me up for a bit. and then, at 1:40 am, the kid called me into his room because he had a bad dream. all of that and i still was up at 5:15.

still, rising early allows me time to do lots of stuff before the rest of the house is up for the day. and lately i’ve been spending time working on recipes for southern biscuits. see, my dad (the originator of the internal alarm) came from a long line of north carolinians and biscuits were pretty much always on his mind - especially if they were swimming in a pool of sausage gravy. it seems only fitting that i use my inheritance of the internal alarm as a way to perfect something he loved so dearly.

to guide me in my quest for southern biscuit perfection is a book called, amazingly enough, southern biscuits. this book is a crazy-useful tool - filled with recipe after recipe for biscuits. my next few posts will include some tips and hints i’ve learned from southern biscuits plus a recipe or two…one that’s so easy it only requires three ingredients!

now i’m off to drink a gallon of coffee. followed by a pot of black tea.