I have always felt that morning people are insufferable. Today I realized that when I must be woken up, I find people insufferable. There’s a difference.

Over the past two or three weeks, my wife and I are starting to see the first signs of a reliable pattern in our lives since our son Julian was born six months ago. We’ve established a bedtime between eight and nine o clock at night, and mercifully, Julian has decided that “morning” begins at eight in the morning.

As many with kids already know, however, this means that if my wife and I want to do anything we have to do it after 8pm and before 8am, including sleep.

And so it is that for the past week we’ve been trying to get up in the morning before Julian. People are still insufferable, but I sure can get a lot done in an hour. I can see the appeal.

The next step is teaching myself to go to sleep in less than 45 minutes, and before eleven.

1. At the grocery store, people check out in waves; there are no lines, and occasionally there are long lines. Ask any grocery checker if you don’t believe me.
2. How food brands take over from nowhere. In Seattle, four years ago who ever heard of Boar’s Head meats? And a year ago who had heard of “Dave’s Killer Bread.” Now try to find a place without them.

Several years back, at the (warranted) insistence of Andru Edwards, I purchased a copy of OmniFocus by the Omni Group. It’s an expensive program at $80 but it’s been a very useful program over the years.

It’s priced like boutique software because it is; the Omni Group is a relatively small Seattle company, and I like to buy local tech if I can. Worth the markup.

When I first started using it, I had to manually sync in to the OmniFocus iPhone app (boutique price: $20), because at this time Things wasn’t much of a threat (or did it even exist?), and so users were left to their own, often elaborate, methods of syncing.

Now syncing appears built in, but my system still works and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

The thing is, I really would like the iPad version of OmniFocus, but I do not want it for the Boutique price of $40.

In fact, I’ve been tempted a number of times to jump ship for Things. The iPhone and iPad apps are a much more reasonable $10 and $20 respectively, less collectively than the iPad app for OmniFocus.

But then of course I’d have to buy the Mac version of Things for $50, and I haven’t yet convinced myself I’m willing to throw away $40 to jump into an entirely new ecosystem, even if it is one that promises not to gouge me on future interface options I might want to use.

As a result, I’m stuck in the OmniGroup garden, at least for the time being.