I need less alarm in life

Today has been a good day. I woke up using only one alarm and wasn't late to work.
Rali and I got into a fight recently because she felt as though she was the only one with responsibility for my waking up and getting to work in the morning. One thing she was frustrated with was that I would set two alarms and just ride the snooze button until she, essentially, kicked me out of bed. So, after this spat, we decided she is not to offer help in the mornings.
Well, obviously, she really was the one getting me out of bed in the morning, so I was freaked out I'd be hours late. Instead, I tried to be clever. Instead of giving myself all this buffer time from when the first alarm went off and when I actually needed to be up, I thought maybe it would help to just set one alarm and set it for exactly when if I didn't get up, I'd be late. This in the hopes that the alarm would go off and I would just get up, instead of lazing around in bed for an hour as alarms keep going off every however many minutes.
I tried it succesfully this morning. I got up after about 15 minutes of time but it worked out as I had incorrectly judged when I needed to be up and moving by about that much. In fact, I wasn't at all late to work in the end, but early by a few minutes. This is rather remarkable for me, if not for you.

Work was good. I was expo and felt like I kept up brilliantly at all times. The only thing that wasn't so hot and awesome happened in the very beginning. I have to cut green apples into thin slices to stick in the swiss oatmeal cup. I didn't remember this until the first order for a swiss cup of oatmeal came through. So, I thought, it's still pretty slow, I'll just go get an apple and do it right now. This was going fine until I flailed a little too much with the knife and sliced off a little chunk of my thumb. I'm trying to get better at cutting the correct way with a knife but it's obviously not going too brilliantly. This happened to occur as my manager was right behind me and, seeing as I wasn't wearing the protective cutting glove they suggest using, I opted not to draw to much attention to my situation. So, instead of crying out in bloody-murderish pain, I calmly threw away the apple with the small peice of my thumb on it, cleaned up, grabbed a wad of paper towels, and jogged to the office in the back praying it was still open. Thank God, it was, and I grabbed a bandage (the adhesive kind that are made for fingertips).
Now, one thing about food safety is that if you cut your finger, you have to wear what the box labels as a "fingercot." I'm not really sure why they call it that, because it is clearly a finger condom. It looks exactly like a miniature, rolled-up condom. Until you unroll it onto your finger. Then it looks like an unrolled condom. And if you unthinkingly leave a small amount of empty space above the tip of your thumb, like I did, then it looks rather idiotic. I'm pretty sure my thumb isn't going to do anything but bleed; I don't know what I was thinking.

On My Mind

Waking up in a good way. Getting up and focusing on what I'm doing.

Eastern ways of life. Is there more... er... focus on focus? Where is the concept of focus talked about? More importantly, how does one improve on focusing?

A friend at work was talking about her child. Specifically how her husband had gotten upset when their daughter didn't want to hang out with them but rather a different family member. Rali and I joke that when her sister's kids grow up, we expect them to come and hang out with us, the cool aunt and uncle, when they are fed up with their parents. I was thinking about this kind of thing and it made me think about how children shouldn't be viewed as the parent's property but as a part of the community. And they should be a part of the community. It's hard in America where there isn't a strong community made up of physical neighbors. Towns aren't unified by anything other than politics. And politics is hardly representative of the people.

There is a great story I heard at Newbold, in the conservative service. A man told of how he was sick of waking up to alarms and starting his day like that. He felt like it was ruining his whole day to wake to loud noise and fear and such. So he prayed to God and asked him to wake him up for whatever he needed to wake up for, with enough time to get ready and such. That night he didn't set his alarm. He hasn't set one since. He hasn't been late for anything because of sleeping in since.