Insomnia

Ya gotta love 'em--those nights when you fall asleep like a baby, but then by jiminy you're wide awake at 2:30! I used to twist and turn and fret and stew when that happened, but I discovered the secret of rolling with it! Now I almost relish waking up and finding myself energized in the wee hours! Last night I woke up at 12:30 and lay in bed for awhile considering my options. A train went by (the track runs adjacent to Almosta Ranch Hadd about 3/4's of a mile away), and the search light out at the airport swept the sky a few times. I could tell that my internal clock was revving up! No chance of falling back to sleep here, so I slapped on a bathrobe and went downstairs. I put the headphones on and played the Clavinova for awhile. (Can I log that in as practice time??) Then I put away some stuff off of the kitchen island and poured myself some apple juice. Where's my knitting? My mind works disjointedly at best, but at night I am totally a victim of its random patterns. Up to my knitting loft I bounded--surely I can find something to knit up there. I got distracted by a stack of papers on the desk and read through a few patterns I hadn't had a chance to look at. I also strolled through a couple of the desk drawers and checked the ink content of four pens. And then because email is never far from my thoughts I went back down the loft stairs to the computer. Not much email coming in in the middle of the night, though, but I did check out some cd's on Amazon.com. Inevitably Mugsy had joined me now. He gets the mid-night thirsties, and it turns out that last night he had the munchies too! I gave him a chewie and settled back in front of the computer--this time with my knitting basket at my side which I'd lugged down from upstairs. Cranked up the space heater. About this time Paco must have sensed my absence. He staggered down to inquire about my state. We smooched a bit, and he reminded me that my 5 A.M. wakeup call was not that far away. I compromised by climbing back into bed and wrapping my cold legs and feet around his back. For occasions such as these I keep an REI lcd headlamp in my nightstand drawer. I velcroed it around my head and began reading Broken For You which I had read about in the Chinaberry catalog yesterday and gone straight to the library for after school. What a GREAT book--I could tell already! But then my headlamp began to flicker, fade in, fade out, flicker, fade... fade...dimming...we're losing you here... flicker...fade...fade...fade...fade...gone. Aw heck. What a waste of time. So with nothing left to do, I had to opt for the least effective use of a good block of calm peaceful night and go back to sleep. Oh, here's a picture of Paco on the nights he beats me to sleep and knows I'll want to read for awhile. What I'd really like to post is the somewhat scary one that would be of me in my "miner" light. But then that would mean that someone else was awake in the room in which case I'd just turned on the light. Right?