I am not a morning person. It takes me a while to get myself warmed up and ready to go. My usual routine is to wake up, turn on lappy, make coffee, open some web pages (twitter and reddit have really reduced the number of sites I go through on my web surfing routine, all my boingboing, slashdot and techdirt headlines are aggregated and combined on one page)
It’s only after an hour or two that I’m ready to actually do anything. And being a full time artist, once I’ve reached this point, I can usually ignore the clock and just keep on working until my hand-eye coordination degrades to the point where I know I need more sleep.
I had a break from this routine over the weekend, and this break provided me with a good reminder of just how useless I can be in those first few moments after waking up.
I’m not completely useless, mind you; I am able to grunt, moan, and stumble across the room without knocking over too many objects along the way. That’s about all I’m capable of for the first few minutes, but it’s enough to get me out the door.
I spent some time up North with my parents, and I had to catch a very early ride back to the city with my brother.
I thought it might be an idea to brush the snow off his car. Since he’s doing me a huge favour, it might be an idea for me to do him one. And what’s worse than having to scrape a sheet of ice off your windshield in the freezing cold, before you’ve even had a chance to take a sip of the coffee in your travel mug. No, I would be nice, I would do this for him.
I set my camera bag down on to the driveway, and pick up a brush and scraper, and I get to work. I brush of the snow, scrape off the odd bit of ice, make sure all his lights and licence plates are clear, and do a quick walk-a-round, just to be safe.
Just as I finish clearing off the last window, my brother emerges from the front door of the house.
I drop the scraper, then we both get into the car, and we drive to the city.
What did I miss?
Can you guess?
That’s right.
I never mentioned picking up my camera case off the driveway and loading it into the car before driving away.
And why didn’t I mention performing that action in my little story?
Well… I also forgot to perform that action this morning.
That’s right; all of my fancy camera gear, in one fancy camera case, was left sitting outside on the front driveway in -20 degree weather.
Nice move, Kyle.
D’ho!