I've been discovering interesting things about myself the past few months, and just reaffirmed something today:

I'm both a morning person and a night person.

Not completely sure how that works, but here it is.

I do a lot of productive work at night - I can focus, there are relatively few distractions - so a lot happens for me at night.

Tonight I pulled a particularly long night stretch, shipping an important prototype for a project. I looked out the (east facing) window, and the sun was coming up. Over the next 30 minutes, as I finished my work, I noticed how everything seemed to wake up - everything except all the people.

I was reminded about how much I like the mornings (once I get up for them) - everything feels new, clean, and ready to start the day.

Since I had some time to burn before I had to be back to the office, I took a walk around town. Very few cars on the road, only a couple people, birds chirping, the sun shining - all those fine things.

So, at least for the morning, I'm awake, today. That'll probably change around 3:30 or 4 this afternoon (it was a long night), but for now I'm ready for whatever the day throws at me.

That is, as long as it's not too bad.

At DC we went and visited all most of the monuments on the mall. I took this picture of the Washington Monument. It was all barricaded off, so we didn't even try to see if it was open to tourists.