SCHEDULED INSOMNIA

After years and years of scorn for insomniacs, I am now dependent on a small blue pill if I expect to get any actual sleep.

But now I need to plan for a few nights of staying awake all night.
There are certain advantages, honestly, to being awake all night - such as:

- Hours and hours of stunningly awful grade-B movies, like "Godzilla Meets Vampire Baby" and "Human Zombies At The Prom."

- Finding all the your friends who are also insomniacs on Facebook and writing what will appear tomorrow as meaningless babble but at the moment appears incredible profound.

- The number of infomercial that promise instant youth, immediate slender and fit bodies, erections that may last up to four hours all for never-ending payments of $34.99 a month, payable through any type of plastic, just call our operators in Sri Lanka within the next five minutes.

- The ever increasing weight of your exhausted limbs as the exhaustion grows; it is novel.

- The gradual, almost unmeasurable but beautiful moments of increasing luminous in the east.

- Finally falling asleep just as the rest of the world is waking up, into that deep deep zone of fatigue that hits the absolute bottom of dreamless sleep.

I think I better wait until tomorrow night, however - than I can sleep when everyone else is gone.

CAT EYES

There is a battle going on between my cat and me, and the cat is winning.

Pandora has been banned from my bedroom to provide myself with at least one allergy-free area.

And it's difficult, because you can't simply shut the bedroom door - it doesn't latch completely, and Pandora will repeatedly throw himself against the door until it opens (this is not a small cat - at around 25 lbs he can pack a pretty big wallop).

My dog will lie right in the doorway to keep the cat out, but Pandora can jump over him much quicker than poor old arthritic Murray can get up (which is interesting because Pandora is actually older than Murray).

 
So I have been forced to resort to violence - throwing tennis balls at him.
 
Now, this is a smart cat... much smarter than I am at this stage of my life. So he sits just outside of range, and does something much worse.
 
Simply stares at me.  

It's a battle of wills...

... and he is winning.

GONE WITH THE WIND

Wind is a little bit scary at times.

The weather forecasters can be counted on to predict a 10% chance of showers, and then have a four-day downpour cause massive flooding.

When they call for a week of complete sunshine, the dark clouds begin to move in immediately.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a job where you are consistently wrong and still be employed?

But wind - how can they predict so exactly something that you can't even SEE?

They seem to get it close to the MINUTE it will begin, the speed down perfectly, and how long it is going to last.

It's always amusing to hear the forecast for "hurricane-force" winds here in Arizona, where we are pretty far from any ocean.

Anyone know the secret?

IN MEMORY OF ROB KRENTZ

The body of a rancher, a Rob Krentz outside of Douglas, was found yesterday morning. The last contact with him was a phone call to his brother, telling him that he was helping out some illegal aliens on Saturday afternoon.

It's not that incredibly close to my house - Apache is about 50 miles east of me, NE of Douglas - so I shouldn't be shocked.

But I am appalled - or perhaps horrified is a better term - by the outpouring of e-comments in reaction to this murder... National Guard, armed and ready to shoot, on every inch of the border. Army, ditto. Complete closure of the border (which anyone who has been down here realizes is logically impossible). Everyone armed - militia roaming the border..... geesh.

I am extremely sorry rancher was murdered. It was a horrible, tragic event.

But I am also painfully aware of how many illegal immigrants have died right around where I live during the past ten years - exposure, dehydration, robbed, killed by drug dealers, by the coyotes (human smugglers) who bring them to the border. Sometimes their bodies are found right away - many weeks after their death. Many are never identified - their families never know what happened to them.

Sorry, guys, I am fully aware that there is no easy solution down here at the border  - but please, let us acknowledge the loss of not just U.S. citizens lives, but the people so desperate for a better life that they lose the one they have.

FEELING LIKE CPAC

My husband has severe sleep apenea.

He snores - and then stops breathing - and then gasps for breath, waking himself up - and then begins snoring again.

His doctor prescribed a CPAC machine for him a few years ago, but he was uncomfortable enough with it after just a few mintues that he never used it.

My second daughter has sleep apenea.... ditto.

I just got a CPAC machine... and I love it. But I don't look anything like the lady on the right - however, the photo on the right is almost a perfect representation.

I don't have sleep apenea, but after undergoing two sleep studies (see my blog from 1/26/10), I had low-enough oxygen intake that hey, it couldn't hurt. My doctor was very much, "hey, if it helps, great, if it doesn't, you don't have to stay with it."

And it's only two nights, but I now know how much of my regular day was ruled by feelings of sheer exhaustion - all of it.

Right now, after six hours of sleep with the stupid, loud, sputtering CPAC machine right by my head, I feel WONDERFUL.

Please, may it continue.

MOTHER AND CHILD

Haven't you heard people say, "Oh, I learned such-and-such from my mom."  (Well, the "such-and-such" part isn't something you have normally hear, right?)

But you know, like "My mom taught me how to make the best cakes," or "My mom was the one I'd call whenever I needed advice," or "My mom showed me the best way to kick a guy in his testicles." 

I didn't ever have that kind of relationship with my mother - I learned to cook from college room-mates, I called my dad when I needed advice, and I learned how to knee someone on my own.
 But I do have this kind of relationship with my oldest daughter.

It's just flip-flopped.

Earlier this week, I was wearing Harmony's jeans jacket, wearing her brown shoes, doing "the loop" in Target, with a not-quite-iPhone-but-almost in my pocket and her iPod in my ears. I went home and made the chicken salad recipe she gave me. And called her that night to ask advice.

Is this healthy?

A BLANK CANVAS

The word, antidisestablishmentarism, was taught to me at an extrememly young age by my older brother as the longest word in the English dictionary.

It has since been superceded by pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

But one of my favorite all time words is anthropomorphic, meaning ascribing human characteristics to animals and/or objects.

This descibed my actions perfectionally.
 

Every car I have owned has been given a name, and has had a personality. I have had Charlie (whose real name was Charlene, but she was sort of a tomboy, and hated being called that) - The Blue Goose (VW van - guess which color) - Grey Ghost (an extremely reliable Honda that was traded in for a new car by accident - I meant for them to take my husband's red Honda instead of mine) - and most recently my pickup, Blanca.

Today driving my new (new to be,albeit a used vehicle) Ford Ranger 2003 Extended Cab home, her name was obvious.

 
Maggie.
 

It's the first automatic transmission I have had in years and years and years - the tag on it says it's green, although I think that is a stretch of some male imagination (it's a beyond grey dark but not black) - and the interior is almost EXACTLY the same as my now-demolished Mazda pickup.

 

I feel almost as though I have Blanca back - does anyone know of a word that combines  anthropomorphicism and reincarnation (Google only comes up with a link to www.mfn.org.au/newsletters/2008/2008_06MFNnewsletter.pdf, so your guess is as good as mine).