3304 Sleep reset

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Anyone who inhabits himself cannot believe in objective thinking.
-- Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself --

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I've been going to bed early pretty much ever since I've moved down here. I don't know why. I'm not watching TV much, lately I've had it on a total of maybe three to five hours a week, and that might be part of it. No reason to stay up late. Mainly I think it's because I've been waking up so early, so by 9 or 10 pm I'm tired.

I don't know why I'm waking up so early. There's a constant sound coming from the east, the side of the house my bedroom is on. It sounds like tree frogs, like shaking small chains, with a deeper undercurrent of machinery. I had noticed it during the winter, starting up in the evening and going until 2 or 3 am. Now, in the summer, it's constant. The really weird part is that no one else can hear it, even on my porch, only me, and I can't hear it anywhere else except in the front of my house and my yard. It's driving me crazy.

I woke this morning at 5 am and couldn't get back to sleep. I had set the A/C higher overnight (I don't know why, habit I guess, do the opposite with heat in the winter) and it was already 80 F in the bedroom when I woke. The birds were going crazy. When I got downstairs I turned the TV on for the news, and caught the numbers 100-105 F - today's prediction.

Good Grief! This is New Jersey! And I haven't felt humidity like this since I left St. Louis. Everything feels damp. Nothing dries. It's hard to breathe. (Nothing dries except the plants outside. The lawn, the tomato and pepper plants, the flowers. They scream constantly. The sun! The sun!)

When I wake in the morning, my mind is in high gear - fussing over the old house and the amount of work it's going to take to get out of there. There's just too much STUFF! I'm getting more and more willing to throw out perfectly good stuff, just to get it gone. And The Man. I wish I knew for sure what's going on there.

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Daughter and Hercules contribute to the loud bird problem. They bought their house from an elderly couple, and the old man in retirement built birdhouses. They have (I haven't counted, but it's something like) 15 birdhouses in the trees on their lot, and they are all occupied, with several varieties of birds and a few squirrels. The birds congregate there. Right across the street from my bedroom window. They start up just before the sun peeks over the horizon. Yeah, it's nice, but loud.
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