Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. When Karen and Michael came to town last week, we were looking for cool, veggie-friendly food for dinner. When we got to Lebanese Taverna, I was dismayed to discover they’d gotten rid of their page full of vegetarian food. Or at least I was until I realized there was another page of the menu tucked under a flap I’d missed. Dinner was great.

2. I took the first six episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard out of the video store the other day. Rudi and I watched the first two episodes last night. It definitely wasn’t a deep show, but boy was it enjoyable!

3. The extended Burrow family has had a few more trips to the hospital in the last week than usual. But the good news is that we don’t believe any permanent damage has been sustained by anyone, and some unhealthy behaviors may change as a result.

In the last three months, I have been to New York City twice to see musicals.

I love musicals, but the trip to the Big Apple doesn’t thrill me.

Now comes the good news that this winter the musicals are seeking me out: the Kennedy Center will host Wicked and the National Theatre will put on Les Misérables, my favorite musical of all time.

Rudi hasn’t ever seen Les Mis, and I haven’t seen it since I was a senior in high school, when I caught it twice — once at the Shubert in New Haven with a friend and her family and once in New York with my French club at a performance starring Debby Gibson as Eponine.

I love the music of Les Mis. It’s only sheer willpower (and the fact that it’s approaching 3 a.m.) keeping me from digging it out now and blasting it.

Hurray for touring companies!

When Karen and I were teenagers, we were even more nightowlish than we are now (Rudi and Michael may find that hard to believe). I existed on hours of sleep that could be counted on one hand, while Karen snatched her hours of rest whenever she could find them.

At one point, however, she decided to resynchronize her internal clock and, after doing some research, worked to create new zeitgebers for herself.

What, you ask, are zeitgebers?

Naturally, zeitgebers (German for “time givers”) are the regular occurrences that set a daily rhythm to your day (such as sunlight or temperature). Artificially, they can be anything that regulates your internal clock — from meals to regular activities, such as going for a run or leaving for work or school. They’re the things that cause you to wake up five minutes before your alarm is due to go off every morning. And they generally instruct your body to expect certain things at certain times — creating your body’s version of a Pavlovian response.

My problem is that I currently lack zeitgebers. I eat dinner at random hours — midnight on Sunday, seven on Monday, ten last night, nine tonight. I go to work at different times. I eat lunch whenever I think of it. And it’s starting to create problems with going to sleep, as I’m typing this at half past two in the morning, the only soul awake in the Burrow…

So when I return from Connecticut next week, I will aspire to create some structure in my life to convince my body that 3 a.m. is not an adequate bedtime. I’m not looking to become too regulated (my personality doesn’t really suit that sort of existence or vice versa), but just regular enough that I can hit the hay closer to midnight than sunrise — at least most of the time.

So wish me luck. Or, better yet, drop me a line with your preferred zeitgebers. I’ll let you know whether any of them work for me.