Can't sleep.

Again. It's after midnight..... can't sleep. After an hour of tossing and turning, it was time to just get out of the bed.

Nothing really going on lately..... nothing much to write about. It's still hot..... broiling hot. We did have one night of rain this past week. I woke up in the middle of the night (can't remember which night it was) and I heard the rain hitting the windows. Strange sound, when you haven't heard it for so long. It rained all night and most of the next morning. I thought for sure there would be a huge puddle (at least) in the pond. There was a puddle, but just a small one, and as soon as the sun came out and the temperature got near to 100 degrees, the puddle dried up.

We haven't had any wildlife adventures lately.... except for the raccoon that comes up on the porch from time to time. I'm sure he's looking for cat food left out there for Gatsby. While we were in Florida, Gatsby stayed outside along with his food dish, replenished twice a day by friends J&J. Whatever dry food that Gatsby left in that dish, I'm sure the raccoon was gobbling up after dark. After just a few days away, Gatsby looked a little bit thinner when we got home. That cat isn't used to sharing his food with Mickey and Sweet Pea, much less a raccoon.

At any given time, there are nearly a dozen barn swallows on our porch. The babies have all left the nests now.... they fly around the property during the day and come back to sleep near their nests at night. They line up on the moulding over the kitchen windows, which of course means that the porch below those windows are polka-dotted with their night-time droppings. I sweep up every morning, they drop their 'gifts' during the night, I sweep up.... they drop..... (A small price to pay for the sweet little sounds those birds make all day long.)

Wasps..... so many wasp-nests by the barn..... we found three new ones this afternoon. We spray them with those big green cans of bug-stuff...... the nests get soaked, the wasps die, we knock down the wasp-condo things, but then more wasps come along and just re-build. I got stung by a wasp a few years ago when we were in the other house.... immediately got me sick, sick, sick. A doctor friend/neighbor of ours told me I was allergic to wasp stings. Told me to stay away from wasps, especially their nests, which they're going to protect and that's when they're more likely to sting-- when you get too close to their cone-shaped condo. There must be a zillion wasps out here in the hills...... half of them are either in or near our barn. Another sting is in my future... it's only a matter of time.

My cousin F is still without her computer..... we're hoping her daughter can solve the problem this weekend. Until then, my InBox is mostly empty....we both miss our daily eMails. Snail-mail just isn't the same... we've spoken on the phone a couple of times this week, but still, being able to type out an eMail without the intrusiveness of the telephone is very much missed. And to think... the kids today (Miss C's age) don't use eMail much-- they say it's too slow. (Slow?!) So they send text-messages instead. I have no idea how to do that. My phone can do a lot of things that I don't know how to do. To me, it's just a phone. To Miss C's generation, it's their world.

And this is my world: not being able to fall asleep on a Saturday night. I finished a Beverley Nichols' book this afternoon ("Down The Kitchen Sink") and I just read a dog book by Anna Quindlen ("Good Dog. Stay.")

The dog book got me to thinking about Gracie. Maybe that's why I can't fall asleep.