Sleep deprived

It’s 6:30 A.M., and I have just been routed out of a pleasant sleep by some eager weed-eating fool! I didn’t go to bed until after one o’clock, tossed and turned, yet here it is a mere five hours later, and I am forced awake by the loud whirr of a weed eater. Yes, I understand that it will be over one hundred degrees today, and the earlier it is the cooler it is, and I suppose if they are going to start disturbing people so early, a Friday morning is admittedly better than a Saturday morning when more of us get to sleep in, but darn it! Its intermittent buzz is loud and aggravating enough that even if it stopped immediately, I couldn’t fall back to sleep.


As bad as it is though, I’d rather be awakened by a weed eater than by a barking dog. I love dogs in general, it’s their owners that let them bark incessantly that I have a problem with. Barking is my absolute least favorite sound in the world because it has been the most common wake-up-before-I’m-ready, sound throughout my life . I‘m sure it has to due with my belief that the dog owners are some how snoozing away, while I am wide awake, and an angry, disgruntled mess.

Besides weed eaters, and dogs, that can ruin a perfectly good sleep anywhere, when we spend the night at our home in the pines, I have mornings when geese, ducks, or birds are my unwanted alarm clock. I can’t do a thing about geese and ducks, but I did outsmart the swallows that built their nest on an eave above our deck. Unfortunately, it seems that in the swallow species, the parents wake up the kids before dawn! Every morning, while it was still dark outside, mommy, or daddy, swallow perched right under our bedroom window, and sang and chattered an hour before sunrise. UGH! Even though I am quite aware that it’s against the law to disturb an active swallow’s nest, I felt like knocking the little mud creation down hoping they would relocate to someone’s else’s deck. Yet, I was also very excited with the prospect of watching the babies learn to fly. I stewed over a solution for days, pretty much at precisely four a.m. every morning, until finally, I got the brilliant idea (I do get those occasionally) to put my puppy on the roof. He is a wonderful, fake, little puppy (no doubt the absolute best dog in the world) who breathes softly, his little tummy rising and falling, and the noise he makes is just loud enough to fake out mommy, or daddy, bird. Puppy’s new job is to rest from sunset to sunrise on the exact spot where the parent swallow HAD perched to sing. And, yeah me, I never was awakened by it again! Now we are co-existing in peace and quiet, the sounds of the wind whistling through the pines, a perfect lullaby that allows me to sleep uninterrupted until my bodily clock awakens me! (And if I’ve had too much tea before bed, that is often earlier than all the other irritants put together!)