I want to wake up like Riley.

Most mornings, it takes sixty-three minutes for me to get out of bed. That’s right, seven snooze cycles. It’s gotten to the point that I set the alarm to wake me an hour before I really have get up just so I’ll make it to the office at a reasonable time. (For me, that’s somewhere around 9:30. Yes, I know.)

I don’t know what it is. It’s not like I dread the day; most of my work days are fine. Sure, I put out a lot of fires, metaphorically speaking, but my entire career’s been like that and after 20 years of fire-outputting I’m pretty used to it. I may even get off on it a little bit. And I don’t have trouble sleeping, not really, so that’s not it. But it just takes me a really long time to drag my ass out from under the covers.

Compare that to the now 82-lb. puppy in the house. He and Jul get up and barrel downstairs for breakfast, then he dashes into the back yard to scare the birds and eat God knows what out of the flower beds. Back in the house, he barrels back up the stairs and bounds into the room to give me a big wet slurp with his half-acre tongue; on really rambunctious days he leaps over me to land on the mattress next to me, give the covers a playful tug, then bounds back off the bed to go rocketing back downstairs. “DAVE IT’S ANOTHER DAY THAT I’M NOT LIVING ON THE STREET OH MY GOD THIS IS SO AWESOME!!!” BOOM BOOM Boom boom … boom … boom. Riley is the canine equivalent to this guy in the morning.

I mean, it’s totally awesome to see that kind of enthusiasm.

But it’s only 7:42, and I have two more snooze cycles to enjoy.