5:25, 5:47 a.m.

Until tomorrow...

5:32 a.m.

Perhaps you're thinking that you'd like to get up and do a sunrise run but it's too hard in the lightest 3 months of the year. I hate to use an alarm clock, but maybe, like me, you have a brain that can wake itself up a few minutes before the alarm goes off. Just setting the alarm is enough to set the brain, and then you never hear the alarm. 

Another technique, and I like this better, is to sleep with the windows open and wake up when you hear the birds. How can you make your sleeping brain react to something you hear, something that's so much gentler than an alarm clock? I don't know, but try just thinking about doing that. It's worked for me lately, but only after using the alarm for a while. At first, I was waking up to the alarm. Then, I adjusted and woke up just before the alarm went off. Then, I readjusted and woke up when the birds "went off." 

This is an excellent arrangement for me. The birds seem to come on about 40 minutes before the sunrise time. That gives me 15 minutes to get from bed to car, 5 minutes to drive to my starting point, and 15 minutes to get to the place you see in my photograph... with 5 extra minutes for gazing into the sky before the sun crosses into view.

Sun.

Sunrise.

More of this morning's luscious sunrise.

An excellent sunrise this morning.

 

 

Overcast sunrise with bikes and geese.

 

Time: 5:42 a.am. 

Did I bike there? No. And bikes are forbidden there. I ran — getting back to my sunrise run (after several days of babying myself after a wisdom tooth extraction). 

Even in Madison, rules are transgressed. Not by me, though. I'm a rule follower, one of the class of persons who are restrained by rules that are not actively enforced and that those who only follow enforced rules do not follow. I regard that as a fundamental unfairness. 

And yet, I can see that willingness of some people to break rules is part of a dynamic that works against excessive restraint. A rule that everyone follows, though there is no enforcement, is probably an excellent rule.

5:37, 5:43 a.m.

5:22, 5:42 a.m.

5:53 a.m.

 

The official sunrise time this morning was 5:41. Earlier today, I posted pictures taken at 5:35, 6 minutes before sunrise, when things looked much redder — as if some horrible disaster were taking place on the opposite shore. But this photo, 12 minutes after sunrise, is mellower, the red replaced by gold. 

The season of the days of the longest light has just begun. Picture the summer solstice in the middle of a 3-month period and you'll see that we're just entering this period. This is something I talked about — squirreled away in the comments — on March 7th of last year:

We're in the part of the year when day and night are balanced. It's already almost 12 hours between sunrise and sunset — and of course the light begins before the actual sunrise time and lasts after the sunset time. It's still winter, and it was a bit cold this morning, but the light is now completely spring.

I think the seasons are wrongly divided. They shouldn't begin with an equinox/solstice, but should have the equinox/solstice put right in the middle. That would correspond to how I feel about the seasons: It's about light, not temperature. Winter should have the solstice as its center and should end by mid-February and so forth.

Using that terminology, I'd have to say that summer has just begun. Perhaps it's better to pick different names, with the season that begins now called Light.

As I write this post, it's 7:58, and the sun hasn't set. Sunset time is 8:06 p.m. today, so I'm looking out on sunset colors, though not from a great vantage point.

FROM THE EMAIL: John writes: 

[I]n Ireland, the year is divided differently than here in the states. The winter months are November, December, and January; the spring months are February, March, and April. May, June, and July make up the summer; and, of course, August, September, and October are the autumn. The Irish names of September and October mean, respectively, “Middle of the harvest” and “End of the Harvest.” 

Now, Ireland is much further north than us and has a much greater variation in the amount of daylight between midsummer and midwinter, so such a way of ordering the year might make more sense than the way we do it here. I’d say it definitely makes more sense than defining summer by bracketing it between two federal holidays!

5:35 a.m.

Sunrise — eastern and western view.

At 5:48, looking right into the sun: 

 

At 5:55, looking west: 

 

The western view shows something that I've mostly ignored all my life: The spring foliage on the trees is varied in color like fall foliage. It's not just green. There's gold, orange, and brown along with a wide range of greens.

At the Big Crack Café...

 

... you can talk all night. 

This morning the snow was gone and the ice on Lake Mendota had a massive crack. It was overcast, and the sunrise looked like this:

Sunrise.

 

Talk about anything.

Sunrise.

 

Talk about anything you like.

Sunrise.

 

At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can talk about anything you want.

 

The photos were taken today at 6:25, 6:40, and 6:42.

At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can write about anything you want.

At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can write about whatever you like.

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