Habits and Productivity

I hear people talk about hos hard it is for them to read their scriptures everyday, or have morning prayers or remember to do certain things. I have a hard time relating to that because I'm so habit driven. When I start a habit, it's pretty easy to continue... Then I married Jeremy.
He is not a habit person. He struggles to create habits, and once he's started them, it is easy for him to fall out of the habit again. This is like a real thing! I'm apparently just weird, that habits are so defined for me.
Kind of related: I have always been more productive in the morning. I find it a lot harder to be disciplined and motivated in the evenings. I have recently started to use this to my advantage and I've started going in to work later so that I can work on my writing in the morning. Jeremy is more productive in the evenings. He doesn't like to read his scriptures in the morning because he doesn't get as much out of it. It's a little mind boggling for me.
These differences have been really good for me to see, and I think it makes me more sympathetic to people who struggle with creating habits and are not very productive in the morning.
What??? People aren't all the same???

Chitons: Memories and Learning

A couple of weeks ago we went to California and we got to go to the beach.
We went tidepooling... or investigating around tide pools. I don't remember ever doing that before on the Pacific Ocean. It was really fun and I enjoyed using my waterproof camera.

Closed anemone without a pebble covering

Partially closed anemone with pebble covering, (they were usually covered with sand and pebbles when they were out of the water to protect themselves from drying out and predators.

Open anemone

Bivalves on rocks

Chiton (the green one in the groove or "home scar". They are a type of mollusk with 8 plates and they crawl around when the tide is in and eat algae and other stuff, (herbivores) with their "radula" (tongue) that is encrusted with magnetite. This means their tongue is very raspy and so they can eat stuff by rasping it off the rocks.

Here is a chiton so you can see the underside. (not my thumb :) )

Here is a snail that had pretty green flesh. Jeremy is good at finding stuff like this. I like doing stuff like this with him.

Here is a fish who really thought he was camouflaged but I got really close.

Swimming crab

Anyway, it was really fun and reminded me a lot of some books my Mom used to read to me by Holling Clancy Holling, particularly "Pagoo" which talks about tide pool life. It made me want to read it again.

Also I was fascinated by the chitons and had to do some research about them. They are weird little critters. I couldn't find out anywhere if they actually carve out little holes for themselves or if just by returning to the same spot all the time they cause a hole to form. Almost all of the ones we saw, and we found a lot, were in little holes.

Winter War

Storm swoops in

Snow's ally

Troops cover the ground

Lay siege to the world

Conquest

Snowmen rally

The honor guard

Sun's Herald charges

Clouds retreat

Snowdrifts fade

Honor guard stands alone

Storm's return their only hope

Unrelenting Sun

Water drips to ground

Snow's Defeat

​

The day of a big storm I was waiting at my bus stop, right in front of a carwash. Between customers (because people were washing clean cars while it was snowing????) one of the car wash attendants made this snowman. The next couple of days I watched as the snowman melted, and I wrote the poem above. I think it is really cool when creativity inspires creativity.