Near-cloudless, sunny and warm this Thursday afternoon on California’s north coast — actually maybe hot without that 5 mile-an-hour ocean breeze, the NWS claims it’s 70. Way-nice in the shade, though, and with a windbreak.

Another unusual morning — a PG&E outage here in Mckinleyville, and Arcata, with electricity out for my apartment for several hours — LoCO has the details.

Creatures of habit at the whim…

(Illustration found here).

Third time in a week my mornings have been unexpected — today a week ago, the infamous AT&T fiber-cable snap, with the Internet and telephone service going off for nearly a day, causing chaos in two counties, and for me on Tuesday, my Internet Provider experienced some sort of cable malfunction, and I couldn’t get online for awhile.
As for both incidents, sort of all’s well that ends well.

Today’s electrical outage, along with the previous problems, revealed I’m pretty-much a creature of scheduled-habit, but with a solid feel for improvisation, and adaptation — mostly resorting to domestic chores instead of surfing the Web. And not going bonkers.
This morning, a review of my daily early fix — coffee.
Due to the hard fact of no electricity, the coffee-maker wouldn’t work — so I made myself a stiff cup of Yerba mate tea (a four-bagger) instead of the java as my gas stove was still operational

And after I’d cleaned the kitchen, including moping the floor, the power returned and I cranked up the coffee pot. Downed a cup, and whoa, a good, energy burst, and subsequently wondered whether I should think about reversing my morning start-up procedures.
Coincidently, after I powered up the laptop and surfed the news sites, a piece was seen about the timing of caffeine in a person’s day, and how maybe we’ve all been doing it wrong.

Coffee first thing, as it appears in bodily functions, is not the trick brain we need. A hormone called cortisol, the so-called stress hormone (and a chemical we produce during the fight-or-flight response), which is regulated by the body’s circadian rhythm, our internal biological clock, is released and produces a natural alertness, intake of coffee might interfere, or even slow-down the process.
Turns out there’s three peak times a day for high cortisol release — 8am to 9am, 12 to 1pm, and finally between about 5:30 and 6:30pm.
Keynote, and along with details via AlterNet from Tuesday:

So in order to maximize our alertness throughout the day, while also not interfering with our bodies’ natural alertness mechanisms, we should be drinking coffee outside of these peak time periods.
Even if you should wake up really early, the body, guided by the circadian rhythm, still increases its cortisol level about 50 percent.
Scientists advise we wait about an hour, regardless of when we wake up, before we consume our cup o’ joe.

I don’t know if I could handle a whole 60 minutes awake without coffee. The article didn’t say anything about the play of mate in the affair, either. Although the tea is highly caffeinated, bears no resemblance to an espresso in powering-up the whole biological system.

Unless there’s a power outage…