My alarm clock

Possibly my new alarm clock

Many people who know me, know that I’m an early bird, waking up at 4:30 AM every day and hitting the sack by 9 PM, or 9:15 PM at the very latest. Like everyone else, I can be an owl or a rooster. Owl stay up late at night, and some people seem to work better at 11 PM or even beyond midnight. Others, like myself, work much better in the wee hours of the morning. My alarm clock is very reliable, as they all are, unless we have a power failure, in which case I wake up usually around 4 AM with the figures of “12:00" flashing repeatedly in my face. Lately I’ve been thinking of replacing my alarm clock with something more natural and down-to-earth, like this exotic rooster. In Malta, they usually wake up the entire neighborhood when everyone is still sleeping, but I remember well in the summer months, when one leaves a window open, the roosters compete against each other on who hits the highest note and they alternate their cock-a-doodle, or as we say in Maltese ‘quqqu-ququ.’ (Trust me it’s much easier to pronounce than it looks.)