Fall at Dawn

The absolute, hands down, best time to be outside is the moments just before and just after dawn. Now, don't misunderstand me. Before dawn is one of the worst times to wake up and get out of bed. But if you manage to do it, it's often worth it.

One of the best things about running is that it gets me outside, sometimes even at this magical hour. And even better, when the sun is coming up later in the fall, and the leaves are changing color, it is fabulous. Most days I run through a wooded area on a dirt path and when the leaves are changing color, its magical.

I am not a photographer. I don't find it an interesting hobby. I don't often take pictures, and I don't own a decent camera. But fall leaves at dawn, when you're underneath them, and the light comes in at a low angle so that every tree for as far as you can see if back lit is breath taking. Its pretty much the only time I ever wish that I could take a good photograph.

The leaves are falling rapidly by now, at least, they are at my house. But here's a picture I took, with my crummy phone, not at dawn, which does a terrible job of capturing how wonderful these woods can look. But I like it anyway.

Starved Rock

While Grammie and Opa were in town, we all went down to Starved Rock, which is a state park about an hour and a half away. As far as I know this is the most topography that the northern half of the state has to offer. (I've recently learned that there are a few arches in southern Illinois!)

The name sake of the park is a butte that sits right on the Illinois river that is about 200 feet tall and covers about a half acre on the top. It's clearly a nice viewpoint for the area, particularly up and down the river. The story behind it's name is that a group of Illinois Indians were trapped up there by some Fox and Potawatomi Indians who were angry about a chief being killed. The sides of the butte are very steep, and it would be easy to defend from anyone trying to get you, but . . . you're also trapped. So, the story goes that the indians starved up there and the rock got its name. I have no clue if that story is true or not, but there you go.

The state park has 13 miles of trails and stairs that cut across a number of steep little canyons that have some fun waterfalls. We didn't get to see a huge part of the park, but it was still a fun little day trip. Next time we'll have to go back when we can stay longer (and I don't have to work an over night shift that night).

The girls at "Wildcat Canyon". Trees make it hard to take pictures of anything large.

This is inside Wildcat Canyon, with the girls as a scale bar.

A closeup of the waterfall from the previous picture. I'm not much of a photographer.

St. Louis Trip

Hey, we went to St. Louis . . . 4 months ago. Look! Pictures!

St. Louis is only 4 1/2 hours away, so we went down there the day after Thanksgiving last year. Shannon's sister Whitney lives on the Illinois side of the river down there, so we went to see her, as well as some sights around town. Some of the high points:

St. Louis Science Center
The St. Louis Science Center is a fairly typical kids oriented science museum, but it's free and parking is only ten bucks, which both seem miraculous to someone living in the Chicago area. We checked the speed of cars on the freeway with radar guns, and found a hamster wheel sized for little girls (which powered what is essentially an enormous marble run).

Cemeteries!
Because no trip is complete without cemeteries. We went to three different cemeteries - in the rain - looking for graves that we had never seen before. Our earliest known Blockburger relatives eventually made their way to this part of Illinois, and even my grandfather was born in Alton. We found graves for the first Julia Blockburger (my great-grandmother) and well as Christian Benjamin Blockburger and Jane Little (my great-great-great grandparents (I think)).

The Arch
The arch was cool. Everything else about going to see the arch was not. First off, I just want to say that I remember being so disappointed when I found out that the arch didn't actually go over the river. (To be clear, I found out about this decades ago, not recently.) Anyway, we reserved tickets in advance to go up to the top of the arch, picked them up and walked over there so we would be there 20 minutes early, or whatever it was the ticket said. And then they had us wait, outside, on a cold, windy, rainy day, for about an hour and a half. I am not sure what the point of selling tickets with a specific time on them is for, if you leave people outside for that long. I also don't understand why they couldn't tell you when you pick up the tickets that they're more than an hour behind schedule, so you should hang out for a bit inside the old courthouse before taking the 15 minute walk over there. But I guess reasonable ideas like this haven't occurred to anyone down there yet. Once we got inside, patience was thin and tempers were short. I did still enjoy riding the tiny little cars up to the top and enjoyed the view.

Fitz's
We asked a friend from St. Louis for a suggestion of where to go out to eat there, and she suggested Fitz's which was fabulous - and we needed something to turn out better than expected after the rough time at the arch. The food was quite good, but the cream soda is simply fantastic. Seriously, it's the best cream soda ever. They make it themselves, and the girls enjoyed watching them bottle soda on site. Everything was so good there that I couldn't be bothered to take any pictures.

Whitney
And, of course it was fun to see Whitney and fam. We went to church with them, and it was good for the girls to get some cousin time. I tried to get a picture of the three of them sitting together in church, bit it was very difficult to get any of them holding still. (Ok, lies, it was easy to get Julia holding still.) This is the best of the many pictures I took.

I'm not moving

That's actually a pretty big announcement for us. At 2 years and 2 months, Shannon and I have hit a new record for the longest stay at a single address in the last 11 years. We don't have any plans to move, either, so this is really uncharted territory for us. As it turns out the total times I've moved in life isn't totally unusual. I'm never quite sure how to count the college years (Does moving home for the summer count? Moving back into the same apartment, but different bedroom, the next year? That week between the end of one contract and the start of the next one?) Nor do I know what to do with time as a missionary. (MTC? Each missionary apartment? But all my mail went to the same place for 22 months . . . ) So, my total number of residences could be anywhere from 12 to 17 (and counting residences and not moves eliminates the college/home issues).

But, until we moved to Illinois a couple of years ago, I had never lived on the Eastern side of a time zone. And let me tell you, it stinks! What is so different? The sun comes up way too early. Sunrise tomorrow is at 7:21am, and that is the latest sunrise of the year. (Thanks, daylight saving time!) In June, the sun comes up as early at 5:15. The downsides to all of this are several. First, young children wake up with the sun, regardless of what the clock says. (I had to unfortunately remind a very tired co-worker with two very young children that he would not be getting any extra sleep this weekend when the clocks change.) Second, I like to sleep in and stay up late (to a small, not-quite-Brian, degree), and it's nice when the sun matches that a little better. Third, the sun goes down so blasted early in the winter - 4:19pm at its earliest. Even leaving work at a very reasonable time still means driving home after sunset in December.

Finally, there is actually one time that I want to be up before sunrise: running is best just before sunrise. I don't know why, but it is. If you're going to be up before the sun, you might as well actually be outdoors to enjoy the sunrise. I run pretty regularly (121 times so far this year), and these last two weeks are about the only time that I am able to get myself out the door before the sun comes up. The only redeeming factor here is that these are also the two weeks where the leaves are at their peak, and I know just where to go running to see them. A few days ago I found some gorgeous leaves in the pre-dawn light, along with 3 deer. I don't run with a camera on me, but I did send Shannon out to go see for herself, and she took a few pictures, which everyone needs to appreciate. So, here you go. Maybe the best reason to run all year is so that when the planets align and you get to go running on a morning that looks like this, you are in good enough shape that you can enjoy it.

Moonlight (Half) Marathon Race Report

Last weekend we took a trip to Springfield (IL) for a very Lincoln weekend.  We drove down Friday night, and on Saturday went to Lincoln's tomb, his house, the old state capitol and the Lincoln museum.  Everything in Springfield seems to be Lincoln themed.  And there's no better way to relax at the end of a day of sight seeing than to run a half marathon!  So, here's the report, which will be long.  I'll throw in a tl;dr at the end.

Background/Prep
For Christmas, I got a race entry from a race to be picked at a later date.  I picked the Moonlight Marathon, which offered a 5k, 6.55mi, half marathon, full marathon, relay marathon and ultra-marathon.  Because I'm not totally crazy, I signed up for the half - I'd never done one of those before.  The fun 'hook' for this race is that it is in the cemetery where Lincoln is buried (Oak Park Cemetery) and takes place at night.  The half marathon started at 7pm, so the first lap was still light, but the second lap would be in the dark, and the marathon "winner" is the person who finished closest to midnight.

Training was good until about two months ago when I went for a run and something was not right with my knee.  I think it's an IT band issue.  After much googling (and no doctors) I decided to just rest it until it felt better, which was several weeks later.  This, of course, hurt my general training plan.  It's not like I had a rigid plan or anything to begin with, but my loose outline of a plan certainly didn't call for a three week stretch with only 10 total miles of running less than a month before the race.  In the last 2 1/2 weeks before the race I got more regular runs in, though the longest was only 7.4 miles.  All told this year I had only one run longer than that 7-miler prior to the race.  Not ideal.

So, I dialed back my expectations by 5 or 10 minutes for the race, and just hoped I could finish it without my leg falling off.

Then we went to the cemetery the morning of the race.  There are hills.  Oh, there are hills.  It's not that there is a specific big hill, it's that the whole cemetery rolls up and down, and race course is two laps weaving around just about every road in the whole place.  When I saw that, I dialed my expectations back another 5 or 10 minutes and prayed that I wouldn't die.

The Race
We didn't have a hotel room or anywhere like that to hang out, so we got to the park where the race started about 90 minutes early, picked up my stuff and spread out a blanket on the grass to lay down for a bit.  The girls played on a playground.  We watched the 5k and 6.55mi races start.  I got changed, put on my glow stick necklace and headlamp and eventually went to the starting line.  There were 83 people doing the half marathon, so I just slid into the middle of the pack and we started.  The first quarter mile or so was on a sidewalk, which made some early passing difficult, which is what I wanted.  As I really wasn't sure how the race would go for me, I wanted to be extra conservative at the start.

Lap 1
It's really hard to not pass people when they're right there in front of you and you know you can pass them.  In the first mile or two I made my way past a few dozen people.  Because there were so many different races on the same course, and they all started at different times, you couldn't be sure who you were really racing against when you saw someone on the course.  Also, the course looped so much you couldn't see anyone who was more than a hundred yards or so in front of you, so it was very difficult to tell where you stood in relation to the other runners.

Somewhere around mile two or so, I also took my first wrong turn of the day.  The course was generally well marked but because there were turns and forks in the road constantly, if you stopped paying attention for just a moment, you could make a wrong turn.  A runner about 20 yards ahead of me made a wrong turn on lap 1, and I followed her.  Luckily we merged back into some runners quickly, and figured out our error and went back.  I guessed at where that was on a map and came up with 0.15 miles that we added to the course with that wrong turn.  The good news was, it at least didn't involve a hill.

I'll spare you the elevation map I made on the internet,but know that there were hills.  The elevation change between the high point and low point on the entire course is probably less than 50 feet, but because the course is so looped in on itself, we kept going up and down the same hills.  At times the course would go down a 30 foot hill and then literally make a u-turn and go right back up it.

After getting back on the course, I caught up to 3 guys that I'd passed a little bit earlier and decided to hang with them for a while, so I wouldn't make any more wrong turns.  They were friendly (as friendly as people can be while in the middle of an exhausting race) and we hung together for quite a while.  For the remainder of the first lap, I was feeling good and felt like I could easily have pulled away from the other guys at any time, and even wondered if I was going too slow.  (Spoiler: I wasn't.)  We came back to the start/finish line and Shannon, Julia and Ella were there cheering and gave me a high-five.  Because the marathon was a prediction race, they didn't have any mile markers on the course, and I didn't even wear my watch, so I really had no idea what my pace was like.  I took my first cup of water and kept powering on.

Lap 2
I started planning on when to drop the other three guys.  I figured I'd say, "I'm going to push on a little bit, you can come if you want," and then go off on my own, but I felt a little bit bad, so I kept putting it off.  Thank goodness for my own fear of sounding like a jerk.  Slowly, our group of four was pulling apart, with me and Scott consistently in the front, and Marlon and Gavin(? Kevin? Something like that) sliding back a few yards at a time.

Lap two started getting dark.  The cemetery isn't very well lit (not surprising) and eventually we had to put on our head lamps.  I don't really love how bulky mine is, or the fact that it's made for someone with an enormous head.  I had to safety pin the strap to make it tight enough.  (I was smart enough to do some trial runs in the dark the week before the race and figure this all out.)

About two miles in to the second lap, we suddenly found ourselves at Lincoln's tomb, which is supposed to be about 4 miles into the lap.  Crap.  Another wrong turn, and this time, in the dark.  Also, we had just done the steepest climb on the course to get up to the tomb parking lot when we figured out that something was wrong.  We stopped, went back to the previous intersection and tried to figure out where we went wrong.  Some volunteers tried to tell us we were going the right way, but we knew we weren't supposed to be there, so we just went backwards until we found our error again.  I mapped out what I think we did wrong and I think it was about 0.40 miles (round trip) that we added to the race.  Apparently we wanted to get our money's worth.  Back on the course, and passing people again.  There are some people that I passed three times, even though they never passed me.  I'm not sure if they noticed or not.

For much of the second lap, I kept going back and forth about how I was doing.  One minute I'd feel like I could step it up a bit, the next I was wondering how I would maintain the current pace until the end.  By this point it was just me and Scott who was a great impromptu running buddy.  I need more running buddies.

Over the last few miles, my legs were done.  My breathing was fine, but leg muscles all over were starting to hurt, and I was running out of energy as well.  It felt like we were holding the same pace, though I have no way of checking.  Scott said he thought we were in the top ten overall, "probably 5th and 6th", though I thought he was crazy for placing us that high.  I asked him if he had anything left for a sprint at the end, and he said he would try over the last tenth of a mile or so.  With about a third of a mile to go, I told him I wanted to see if my legs had anything left, and I took off.  The final quarter mile is along a candle lit path in the cemetery, then across a street, through a slightly muddy field, around a pond and into the finish line.  I suppose I was going faster, though at that point I don't even know if I was.  Finish time was 1:57:13. (8:57/mi)  That was 6/83 overall, 4/26 men.  Despite my "kick" Scott was only 10 seconds behind.

Afterward
I found some water, and so much food.  Pizza, chocolate milk, water, cookies and grapes.  I passed on the oranges, bananas, Pepsi and beer.  Shannon and the girls were still there and everyone was in good spirits (though Julia would soon melt down).  Even though we had to drive three hours home that night, I really wanted to hang around to see if I might have gotten an award.  They were giving out top 3 men overall and then top 3 men under 40 awards, and I figured I had a decent shot at an age group award.  I was up the hill getting more food (pretty cruel of them to have the food at the top of another hill) when they announced that I was the 3rd place male finisher!  I made my way down the hill as quickly as I could and picked up my award!  . . . which I got to keep for about 2 minutes before they called me back up.  I guess there had been a clerical error and I was 4th place male, overall.  So I waited for a few minutes and then got my 1st place under 40 male award.  My first age group victory!  Scott got first place in the over 40 age group.  And that was despite adding about a half a mile to the race course.  I figure I did 13.65 miles, which is an 8:35 pace and would have given a finish time of 1:52:30.  The guy in front of me (3rd place overall) finished in 1:55:18, so I totally would have had him.  I guess that goes to show that it's better to be smart than fast. (I still would have been 12 more minutes behind 2nd place overall.  So there was no catching him.)

TL;DR:
Night time half marathon with lots of short hills, both up and down. (But it felt like mostly up.)  I took two wrong turns which probably added about half a mile to the total.  Found a running buddy that I did about 10 miles of the race with, and who probably saved me from running too fast and then bonking.  (Also saved me from a few (more) wrong turns.)  Finished in 1:57:13 and got first place in the under 40 age group!

How to Drive in Illinois

There is a non-zero chance that you might come to Illinois someday.  There are a fair number of states on either side of it, so even if you aren't coming to visit me, you still might be driving through.  If/when that finally happens, I wanted to help you out a little bit by letting you know how to drive here.  There are some special rules.  I don't know how much they apply to the whole state, but they seem to be true for the parts in Chicagoland that I've experienced.

1. Freeway speed limits aren't really "limits" they're more like "meaningless numbers someone wrote on the side of the road."  Every interstate I've been on here has a posted limit of 55.  No one goes 55.  I know that you're thinking that no one goes the speed limit in whatever state you live in, but you're wrong.  Some people do: they're the ones you complain about all the time on facebook.  But here, literally, no one goes 55.  Or 60.  Around 65 is where the traffic flow starts, and provided there isn't too much traffic, most people are buzzing along at 70 or 75.  Since 55 is an unreasonably low limit, it's like everyone has agreed to pretend it says 65, and then they drive their normal 5-10 over.  Of course there are people doing 80+.  Interestingly, even the cops seem to be ok with this arrangement.  No one seems to get tickets.

2. When you think a light is about to turn green, start pulling into the intersection.  Even though you've stopped 5 feet in front of the stop line, start pulling into the intersection when it seems like it's about to be your turn.  If the light doesn't turn green though, you'd better stop.  At this point your entire car is over the stop line.  But then, when it feels like the green is about to come, start pulling forward again.  Don't worry about the red light or anything, just keep scooting up.  Tonight I saw someone get at least 20 feet past the stop line this way, and they were getting very close to being in the way of traffic that was still going through the intersection, because, you know, they had a green light.  I don't understand the reasoning for this creeping, but if you want to blend in with the locals, you'd better do it, too.

3.  Don't merge until the last possible moment, even if there are dozens of signs warning you of what going on.  You folks from Utah are already pros at this, so just keep doing what you've always been doing.  You Michiganders, just turn off your brain and drive like you're the most important person in the world, even if you end up slowing down everyone including yourself.

4.  Smoke.  Make sure your window is down with your cigarette hanging outside.  And make sure you're stopped in front of me at every single red light. If you have friends, surround my car on all sides, particularly if it's a nice day and I have the windows down.

5.  Make sure you drive as much as possible.  The way I figure, this must be what the Chicagoans are doing.  How else can they ensure that there is a traffic jam on the freeway on a Saturday morning?

Tidbits (made of soy, I promise)

Day 1 of the meatless adventure.  I weighed myself in at 162 pounds, which is a couple of pounds lower than I expected.  It was post run and pre-breakfast, so I was probably short a pound of water.  Even still, I would have anticipated being about 165.  I don't expect to lose weight doing this, but if 2 pounds want to disappear, I guess I won't say no.

We're about to start a 6 day stretch where we break 80 every day.  Summer sure is tough, isn't it?  The hottest day gets all the way up to 84.  It seems like we spend more days with a high below 80 than above, which is just fine by me.  After a winter where we went multiple days without even breaking 0, I think we've earned a nice cool summer.

BYU has scheduled a football game at Northern Illinois which is only 30 miles from my house!  The bad news is that I'll have to successfully not move for 6 years before the game actually happens.  The last time I lived in the same place for 6 years was from ages 11-17.

Demographics

I have six co-workers that sit near me that are roughly a similar age to me.  (We all happen to be male, so I don't have to worry about any pronoun he/she-shenanigans.)  And at our age and gender is about where the similarities stop.  There are two specific areas where I really stand out.

Other guys:
Years married: 4.5
Children: 1.9 (due in a month)

Me:
Years married: 10
Children: 2

The discrepancy doesn't seem so large unless you remember that those are the totals between the six of them.  Apparently I'm really living up to my Utah stereotype of being married and having lots of kids.  I certainly got married younger than the national average, but having 2 kids by age 32 isn't some sort of crazy Utah-County birth rate.  It's a bit odd though when we all go out to lunch or something and I make a comment and then realize that most of the people I'm with aren't married, and almost none of them have kids.

Don't worry though, if ever I feel to abnormal, I can just go to church where everyone got married at 19 and has 5 kids.

Early Birds

Early spring, for we haven't yet hit 60 degrees this year, means the birds start to return.  We don't have as many here as we did in Michigan, which is sad, but we still have quite a few compared to when we lived in Utah.  We have a pond just outside our front door, and there is another larger pond/lake a half mile or so down the road.  I can run there in the mornings again now that the snow is gone, and it's a good place to see birds.

All winter we've had the Canadian Geese around that didn't seem to get the memo that they should have kept going south for a few more hundred miles.  Most of them left for the winter, but some of them are either hardier or dumber than the rest.  The geese have now been joined on the water with several types of ducks, which I don't bother trying to classify.  Robins are common here throughout the winter also.  Near our mail box we have some morning doves, which Shannon likes.

In the last 2 or 3 weeks I've seen more hawks hanging around tall polls.  And, to my particular delight, the red winged blackbirds have come back also.  Also around the pond in just the last 2 or 3 days there have been seagulls as well as what I think are killdeer.  No cardinals yet that I've seen, and it is a little sad how few there are here.  In Michigan we could look out in our backyard at pretty much any random time and see cardinals.  The only other birds that I'm particularly looking out for are the heron that were common at the pond last fall, and perhaps another eagle sighting like we had last year.

Even if people call me old because of it, I still like the birds, particularly because they haven't yet started waking me up at 5 am.

School of my dreams

Evidently, it is every kids dream to go to school in Illinois.  This is because kids rarely actually go to school here.  School was cancelled today and tomorrow because of the cold, so Julia is going to get 14 days of school in this month.  At this rate, to get the standard 180 days of school in, they'll have to keep the schools open for . . . 12.5 months per year.  (January has 23 weekdays this year.  We've had 4 days lost to cold, and 5 days off for New Years, MLK Day and some sort of teacher work day.)  As a half day kindergarten student Julia only goes to school for about 2.5 hours per day, so for the month, she'll get in 35 hours of school.

Presumably, this trend won't continue.  In theory, it won't stay this cold forever, and February and March shouldn't have as many holidays.  On the other hand, they cancelled 2 days of school in September for heat this year, so I suppose anything can happen.

As for me, I don't get any days off between New Years and Memorial Day.  :(

Understanding Numbers

I'm a nerdy guy who likes numbers.  I had a calculator watch for pretty much all of elementary and middle school.  I've got a blog tag just for nerdiness, where I cover hypothetical tournament brackets, Amish friendship bread world dominanace, mathematical parlor tricks, and other vitally important stuff.  The point is: NERD!  I like numbers, and think about them in odd ways at times. 
 But this week, despite the hours of my life I've spent thinking about numbers big and small, I've encountered a number that I'm struggling to wrap my head around.  -43 °F.  This is a little bit funny, because I've operated furnaces at 3800 °F, and made ice cream using liquid nitrogen at -321 °F.  But really, we exist in a pretty small temperature range.  But somehow, I live in a place where the forecast HIGH temp for this next Monday is NEGATIVE 14 DEGREES.  Throw in wind chill and the entire day will feel like somewhere between 38 and 43 degrees below zero.  I don't even know what it means for it to feel that cold.  (Did we calibrate this system by sending a guy out in -40 degree weather, and then sending him into a -10 degree windy place and asking "how does this feel?")

I have seriously spent an unreasonable amount of time today just sitting in a stupor thinking "-43? really?".  Shannon tried to explain how cold it is to Julia, but she besides her weak understanding of temperature in general, she doesn't understand negative numbers at all.  She literally doesn't know what negative 14 even means.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need to start putting on some extra layers to get ready.

Birding

We went for a conference weekend walk along the Fox river (which runs through town here) this morning.  Near the end of our walk, we spotted a bald eagle circling over head.  Maybe he was looking for foxes or something.  (Fox River, ha ha.)  For me, it's the first wild bald eagle I've ever seen, except perhaps the pair the like to nest near the West Yellowstone entrance to Yellowstone.  Except with those ones, they don't let you stop as you drive past, so all you can do is stick your nose up against the window and hope that maybe one of them sticks its head out over the edge of the nest.  Anyway, it was neat.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that it was Shannon who spotted it up there circling.  I suppose I will have to give up my nickname of "eagle eye" for at least a day.

Strangely ILL

Shortly after moving to Michigan, I recorded a few thoughts differences that I'd noticed moving across the country.  They weren't terribly significant things, which is really the most significant thing about the list.   It's pretty much the same story with Illinois.  The country seems to be pretty homogeneous, at least from my sampling which now includes 3 of the 50 states. But here's what I've got so far:

Illinois likes to charge you for . . . well, whatever they think they can get away with.
- There is a $50 registration fee for kindergarten, which is only 2 1/2 hours a day.  If you want full day kindergarten, they have that, but it costs a few thousand dollars.
- They charge you to drive on their roads.  From our house, it costs a couple bucks worth of tolls to get into the city.  And a couple bucks more to get back out.  If you get a fancy electronic box to stick on your windshield, you don't have to stop to pay the tolls, and they are 50% cheaper.
- Property taxes are significantly higher here than they were in Midland.  (And people in Midland sure liked to complain about those.)  Of course, I don't own any property here, so this doesn't have a large direct effect on me.
- We haven't gotten new license plates or drivers licenses yet, but when we do, I'm sure they won't hesitate to charge us.
- Oh! How could I leave this one to so late in the list: they charge you to take away garbage.  Sure, you might say that every city does this, but in St. Charles, you have to buy their garbage bags, or but tags to put on your bags for them to take it away.  I suppose the upside to all this is that if we don't drive, or create garbage, we can save money!

It gets dark really early here
We only moved a few hundred miles west, but we went from the western edge of the Eastern time zone, to the eastern edge of the central time zone.  The net result is that sunset is about 45 minutes earlier than it used to be.  Today, that difference happened to be exactly 45 minutes, as it turns out.  Official sunset time in St. Charles today was 6:32 pm.  And we just barely hit the equinox.  And we haven't come off daylight savings time yet.  By Halloween, sunset will be at 5:48, and by Thanksgiving it will be at 4:24!  That's about where it bottoms out, which, is a good thing, because otherwise I'd go crazy.  Twilight will be before 5pm, so I'll be driving home from work in the middle of the night.  The other side of this is, of course, that the sun comes up that much earlier.  But that still doesn't motivate me to get out of bed.