It's January, so now is a good time to hole up, hibernate, stay home, and linger in a warm bed for just a few more minutes until it's a more reasonable time to get up. In other words, one might as well sleep in later than usual. After all, it's going to be dark for three more hours. Time to turn over on the good side one more time and hope to drift off again until 4:30. That occasional thirty minutes of self-indulgence, as the droll Dorcas Lane character says in Lark Rise, is my one weakness.
Once the weakness has been overcome and there's a return to the daily duties, though, there are more temptations to address. After all, being January, one can't exactly head out to the garden for a round of cultivation, transplanting, watering, and weed pulling. It was warmer in the house when I crawled out than it was outside (Brrrrr!), but that's a very low threshold. The fire's going, another third of the crossword has been vanquished, and the first tea and breakfast has gone into the record books. Soon it will be warm enough inside to shed the blanket and the Oilers/Packers/Jets hat. There's another winter time treat that's been accumulating beside the big chair for a couple of weeks: seed catalogs.