The weather has been improving daily. In fact, the last three days have been nothing but sunshine, with increasing warmth. I’ve been going out with one less layer every morning. Tomorrow, I’ll be graduating to a tee-shirt!

Even though it apparently still gets dark in the middle of the night, I have not seen darkness in about a week. I go to bed in full daylight and get up in full daylight.

After a long, dreary winter, one’s first instinct is to get as much sunshine as possible. The first lesson the north has taught me is that you must crush this instinct in order to get a proper night’s rest. Even though it feels so very wrong to do so, I shut all the blinds in the rig sometime between 8:30 and 10:00 PM to simulate dusk. I’ve covered the windows in the sleeping loft, so it’s quite dark up there. But if I have to get up for any reason during the night (glares at the cats), then my night is shot–the brightness in the rest of the rig wakes me right up. But I have been sleeping better than I would have expected.

That said, the days are starting to have a timelessness that is most confounding. It is easy to get caught up in things during the course of the evening and the next thing you know, it’s going on eleven o’clock! I actually find myself watching the time a lot more now that the environmental time cues are being stripped away.

During the day, however, that sun is oh-so-welcome! I’ve spent the last three days outside from 10AM to 4 or 5PM. I’ve been going through sunblock in record quantities, but I’ve still gained quite a bit of colour and I’m sure any vitamin D deficiency I contracted through the winter has been remedied. 🙂

To think that on Sunday I found myself trying to accept the fact that spending my summer in the Yukon meant having no summer yet again. How quickly the weather has changed!