heading back to the airport on Marta…

This was taken from my 15th story hotel room in Atlanta this morning – obviously facing east! That bright blue rectangle on the left is the sign from the Lenox Square mall.

I have always had an internal alarm clock, and I think the snooze button is broken.

I’m not sure when it started. Likely, it was not when I was young – and I’m fairly certain that my parents would concur. But sometime in the last 20 years or so, the alarm has gotten set, never requiring a backup battery, so to speak.

The alarm clock is pretty regular – around 5 AM every day, seven days a week. On most alarm clocks, there is a snooze button that allows an extra 10 minutes or so of extra sleep. I know of co-workers who hit the real snooze button several times each day, then rush to get ready to leave. My alarm is different. It has no snooze button, no need for one.

When my internal alarm goes off, my brain knows that there is no snooze button. My mind starts racing at what needs done, and the race continues until I’m up – about 10 minutes later at the most. I have done my best to convince myself to sleep in – to wait until the real alarm goes off (set “just in case”), but that is never the case. Once my body’s alarm goes off, I’m up for the day.

While this internal alarm clock is all well and good, I cannot reset based on when I go to bed. If I go to bed at midnight, I’m up at 5. If I go to bed at 11, I’m up at 5. If I am exhausted from a long day and happen to drop at 9 (maybe twice in a year), I’m up before 5, but never after. I think that the most sleep I have gotten in the past year was 7 hours once or twice, most of the time it’s around 5 – 5 1/2 hours. Once I hit that mark, the internal alarm goes off. And, as I said before, there is no need for a snooze button.

So, it’s 5:15 AM and I’m awake. Maybe I’ll go back to sleep – yeah, right…

On the MARTA platform just outside of the Hartsfield airport in Atlanta. I’m going to try to navigate the MARTA system up to the Buckhead area to my hotel.

I’m sitting in the airport, waiting for the inbound AirTran plane to arrive so I can leave on time. I’m not sure what the time to turn a flight is with AirTran, but it used to be really fast with Southwest.

This is one of the first times I have flown for business since 9/11. What a total pain. While I realize that this is all in the name of safety, there is no doubt that the cost to fly has increased dramatically mostly due to the increased security. Removing the shoes is probably the biggest pain, and the fact that I had to check my luggage because I had liquids that couldn’t to into a carry 0n bag because of the size. So, I checked the bag through. I really hope that it makes it since I have everything there other than my laptop and items that I carry back and forth to work daily.

Of course, the flight is overbooked (are there any other kinds?), and they are looking for volunteers. If I didn’t have a meeting tonight, I’d take them up on it!

More from Atlanta.