Musings, Jokes, and Dreams to Wake Me Up 4

I have a certain routine that I like to keep, but that hinges on me waking up within a certain timeframe. I like to be up and getting ready between 7:30 A.M. and 8:30 A.M. Sometimes, I don’t wake up within that timeframe and it winds up being afterwards, but it isn’t as if I can’t still do many of the things that I want to do throughout the day. But everything gets pushed back, or I often wind up with less time for certain things, etc. I don’t NEED to be up this early and I CAN wake up an hour later, but when I do it too often, my other projects get less time.

I go into detail about the long explanation here:

The short version of the story, I have to create something that I NEED to do each morning. So, this is the solution. I am starting my routine, taking a quick one or two minutes to write any musings, jokes, or dreams on my mind, timestamping myself, and then going on with my day. At the beginning of each week, I’ll post last week’s thoughts… with timestamps. There is no hiding from my successes and failures. I’d prefer to be succeeding more often.

9/7/26 8:27 A.M.

I want to know where restaurants get their liquid hand soap for the bathrooms, because I never come across the ones that they use. Most of them use a pink or yellow one that’s clearly just cheap, generic, and gets the job done. Most times they don’t smell bad, most times they’re decent, sometimes they’re actually pretty good, but they’re never anyone’s favorites. 

But every once in a while you wash your hands in a restaurant bathroom and they have a blue liquid soap. This is a rare treat, like when you’re playing a video game and find a magical power up. The blue soaps ALWAYS smell DELICIOUS. So good that you question whether you should head back to the table for your meal, or if you should just stay here and have a blue liquid dinner. I rarely see blue soap, but when I do, it’s always ecstasy to my nose. I want to know where they get their blue soap, and I also want to know why it’s such a high-success-smell-rate with blue.

9/8/26 7:32 A.M.

It’s been said that the best way to start the day is with a laugh. And it’s true, but have you ever been reading something first thing in the morning that is supposed to be funny, but you’re still so tired that you don’t get it? And then you get in the shower and the hot water is hitting you and the shampoo is in your hair and you suddenly go, “Ha! I get it!”

I think my shower makes me smarter. Or it brings me to my accurate level of intelligence, because first thing in the morning, I am not there. I need the hot water and the shampoo named after a mountain explosion yet has floral scents to activate that part of my brain. It must all be permeating my skull to bring life to the part of the brain that understands humor. It must be that mountain explosion shampoo. 

But seriously, why would that smell like flowers? I guess there’s flowers on the mountain… when it exploded… 

9/9/26 7:57 A.M.

I finally got glasses for the first time in my life. When I was a kid, I saw some of my friends getting glasses and I wanted glasses too. But my vision was always so good that I didn’t need them. It made me so mad that I couldn’t see straight! Except I could… which made me even more mad!

It was a long wait but it was worth it. My vision finally became poor enough to fulfill a childhood goal of mine. 

9/10/26 8:18 A.M.

OK, you got novels, you got novellas, you got novelettes, and then you got short stories. What happened there? We started with the novel… wonderful name, by the way… and then with each decrease in length we did a play on the word. Smart move? And then we got down to the shortest version of a story… and we just named it after its description??

Why no novelini? Novellisimo? It’s like how there’s elephants and hippos and rhinos and anteaters. We’re just naming things after their description? That’s lazy. I love writing short stories, but don’t you think they should’ve been named differently?

9/11/26 7:52 A.M.

Who decided that batteries and toothbrushes were going to be put in the same confusing packaging? It’s frustrating because it is rarely clear how you’re supposed to open it, and you oftentimes rip off small pieces to get no closer to the inside of the package… and then either you finally figure out how to do it… or you have one of those lucky times where you figure it out soon into your attempts, and then you say, “I’ll remember this for the next time I open one of these.”

No you won’t! I don’t, anyway! I will go months before I have to open one again, and by the time that rolls around, I have forgotten the secret to opening these packages. And then I’m struggling with it all over again! I understand why batteries are in difficult packaging; they’re expensive and can be a safety hazard, so people shouldn’t be able to easily get into them. But toothbrushes? What’s going on out in the dark toothbrush world that I don’t know about?

9/12/26 8:23 A.M.

A lot of people weigh themselves consistently to keep tabs on their weight, maybe trying to see if they’ve lost weight. I weigh myself consistently, but I am actually trying to gain some weight. I lost a bunch a while ago, gained it back… lost a little more, and now it doesn’t matter too much, but I am trying to gain a bit back if possible. But you know when you weigh yourself, especially the people trying to lose weight, you got to take everything off first or else it’s not an accurate depiction!

When people get weighed at the doctor’s office they’re always like, “Yeah, but that’s not accurate. I got my clothes on.” But at home, you can strip down and get the perfectly accurate reading. But it makes me wonder what medieval knights had to go through back in the day. You know? They went into the doctor’s office with their full suit of armor on, and the doctor weighed them, and they all must have weighed hundreds and hundreds of pounds. And the doctors would be like, “Yo, I thought it was ‘Knights of the Round Table’ not ‘Knights of the Round Gut.’” And then they’d laugh a bunch because body shaming was rampant back then. And then the knights would be like, “Bro, not cool. I got my shining armor on.” And then the doctor would be like, “Oh, also, your iron levels are too high. We got to do something about that.”

What a nightmare. That’s why me, and other modern people, weigh ourselves at home and take off all the armor and clothes for the perfect reading. And then when we go into the doctor’s office and they weigh us, we’re like, “But that’s not accurate! All my armor!” Granted, for me, my weight reads closer to what I want it to be, but it still feels like cheating, and I have to reweigh myself at home to find out the real number.

9/13/26 8:07 A.M.

It’s the first Sunday of NFL football, of course I’m up at a decent time! It’s still strange to me, even though I’ve lived in California for 17 years, that you have to get up to watch the games by 10 A.M.

Back in New Hampshire, we didn’t have to worry about the games starting until 1 P.M. You already had breakfast and probably lunch when the games began, and you could reason why a beer was OK. It’s harder to reason the legitimacy of a 10 A.M. beer here. Not impossible, I’m just saying it’s harder.

9/14/26 8:16 A.M.

It appears to me that no matter what, when applying sunscreen to yourself, the palms of your hands will always be protected. You might miss a part on your chest or back or arms, but if you’re spreading that stuff with your palms, they’ll never get burned. Show me a man with burned palms, and I’ll show you a man who didn’t buy sunscreen… or a strange man who applies it with his nose… 

9/15/26 8:11 A.M.

I hadn’t used Uber in so long that I wasn’t even sure I still had the app on my phone. I used it the other day, and holy hell, Uber, you REEK OF DESPERATION. 

One use and Uber started sending me email after email, text after text. “How was your ride? I know you rated it, but want to rate it further?” “Want to start using Uber Eats too?” “Mind if we send you some coupons for your next ride?” “Hey, come check out this survey so you can tell everyone how much you love us.” “When are you riding again, Steve?”

Hey, Uber, jeez! Relax! I used the app once. Once! In the last several years. I needed it and used it. I’m not trying to get harassed by you just because I used the app again after a long dry spell. You’re coming on too strong. You need to ease up. If you keep going at it like this, next time I’m walking!

9/16/26 7:49 A.M.

Having a dog, or really any pet, just gives you an excuse to talk to yourself without being weird. I’ll say up front, I do believe that our pets know what we’re saying in some capacity. I think they understand us when we talk to them, they get the meaning behind what we’re saying, there’s a bond and a connection.

That being said, how many of us talk to our pets as an excuse to talk to ourselves? If you talk to yourself, saying what you need to do for the day, you’re weird. If you start the sentence off with “Rover” and then say all the same stuff, now it’s addressed to your dog, and you’re not weird. You’re talking to the dog. I don’t know how much your dog cares about what you need to do, but you’re telling him.

I do this all the time. I talk to my tortoise, Joey. I tell her, “Joey, I need to do this and then this and then I can go to the store.” She cares with enough capacity, because the store is where I get her food, but other than that, she doesn’t care whether I tell her or not. I’m telling her so that I’m not talking to myself… mostly… 92%. I don’t know if I’m just telling you this, if I’m giving you a tip, who knows. It’s just what I’m saying.

9/17/26 7:34 A.M.

I think you can probably determine some things about a person based on how they spell the following words.

“Phew!” or “Whew!”
“Jeez!” or “Geez!”
“Whoa!” or “Woah!”

Based on these answers, there are 8 different people that can exist. What are your answers?

9/18/26 8:25 A.M.

Sometimes you wake up in the morning sore, and you can tell exactly how you slept to create this soreness. Sometimes there is a soreness and you realize you’ve slept wrong, and you have an inkling of what stupid position you put your body in.

I am waking up this morning, and this soreness I find in various parts of my body is unfounded. There is no explanation, other than the idea that I slept inside out, and bent in ways a body cannot bend without breaking. So, that’s it? I didn’t just have bad sleep… I had broken sleep? I slept broken. I slept in pieces. I slept outside in and inside out and more closely compared to a pretzel than a person. Like a pretzel, I slept salted. That explains a lot, I’m so sore, I feel a-salted.

9/19/26 9:04 A.M.

Well, I didn’t get up when I wanted to today. I’d say, “It’s Saturday, it’s OK.” Except that I work Saturdays, so it’s still a day that I want to be up at a decent time.

Oh well. It’s going to happen. I had a few days of not great sleep, and though I didn’t necessarily sleep more last night to make up for them, I just didn’t want to get up this morning and was snoozing my alarms repeatedly. I wonder what repeated snoozing of the alarms does to a person. I simultaneously feel anxiety and relaxation from how little I care about if I will get up or not when I do it. It’s a strange feeling. Maybe I occasionally need that strange feeling. Or this is me rationalizing my slight laziness this morning. 

Also, when did the snooze option change from 10 minutes to 9 minutes? I swear many moons ago it was 10 minutes. And what’s this 9 minute nonsense? What’s that number about? Is that so I can still have the illusion of being early because at least it wasn’t 10 minutes? 

9/20/26 7:49 A.M.

So many things in life get worse, or more expensive, or the price stays the same but you get less of the thing you’re paying for. But I recently was given a treat.

My favorite vegan buffalo “Chik’n” nuggets that I get from the frozen food aisle, my guilty pleasure that pairs well with football games and basketball games, they changed something. The package always came with 16 nuggets inside, so I’d often open one and have 8 with something else for my meal, and then save the other 8 for the next time I craved them. Well, I got them recently, had 8 with a meal, and then went to have my next meal, and there were 9 remaining. I thought it was a happy mistake, but then the same thing happened with the next bag, and the next, and the next.

They went from 16 to 17! And the price didn’t change! This is the smallest thing I could get excited for in life, but with inflation, with cost of food rising, cost of electricity rising, cost of water rising, cost of rent rising… there is one beacon of hope. I started to get one extra free vegan buffalo nugget in my package. Someone out there is looking out for me. A win is a win, no matter how small. And they make my Football Sundays a little bit better… one nugget better.