The miracles of sunrise

For the last 36 hours or so, I've been whining about how early I had to get up this morning. But this morning I'm extremely happy. It was a little spooky to get ready for school when it was still pitch black outside, but the lack of traffic was very pleasant. Even driving in the dark was nice, since I wasn't exhausted. I listened to Holden Evening Prayer on my way in; it was slightly surreal, since I'm used to hearing it (or, when I'm lucky, singing it) closer to bedtime, but it fits the dark hours nicely.

On campus, the blossoming trees in the pools of light from the streetlights were lovely. (Dy beat me to it in the comments here, but I really have been meaning to mention that Maryland smells much better now that it's spring! Most of the campus is full of pink magnolia trees, and there are white blossoming trees all around my building, and it's been sunny and warm enough to sit under them doing my school work. It looks and smells heavenly.) I missed a lot of the sunrise, which is too bad, but I still got to see the world growing brighter outside my window, and it seemed like a miracle. Even the grass seemed to glow as it went from some vague dark color to a bright spring green. Someone planned well, making the world spin so that daylight comes back to everyone every, um, day. Well, OK, it's silly, but it's still wonderful.

I suppose it makes sense that getting up so early makes me happy; it's in my genes. My dad has always gotten up early -- once he forgot to reset his alarm for daylight savings time and woke up at 3:30. I'll have to try getting up early for several days in a row, if I can, to see if it's really the time or just the novelty that I'm enjoying.

I'm certainly glad that I have this many hours before my statistics exam, because it really lets me relax about studying for it. Just got back from the library, in fact; I walked over as soon as they opened to check out The Well-Educated Mind. I really enjoyed The Well-Trained Mind, and I'm re-reading it right now, but I don't plan on having children for many years yet, and it's a bit late to homeschool myself in a WTM way... Back to work now, though.