Real and Imaginary Creatures of the Night

I haven’t been sleeping the best of late. Pick your reason: world turned upside-down by the recent selling of everything I know, living in an eight-foot by twenty-foot box with two nocturnal cats, or being a woman of almost-50 and, well, guess. (Only the women will get that one.)

I replaced my crappy analog thermostat in Junebug with a digital, programmable one yesterday, with only minor complications–nothing a call to Dad Bazany couldn’t remedy. And, feeling all accomplished, I set the program to cool down to 73 at night and 78 during the day. When I woke up at midnight in a full body sweat, I realized I didn’t do it right. We’ll have to work on that another time. It’s nothing that a little manual override can’t fix, and back to sleep I went.

Only to have one of the worst nightmares I’ve ever had. A scaly, bulbous-headed monster with a face comprised of gaping shark-like teeth was weighing my legs down and biting my thigh. Gnaw-gnaw-gnaw. Somewhere in the this horrific realization, I reached over to my wall shelf and grabbed my Ruger 380, aimed it, cocked it — oops; turn the safety off — and shot the fucker four times. It withered away and died. Seconds later, I woke up and mentally waded through that dream-to-reality realization where the strong go back to sleep and the weak turn on their bedside lamp and call their mommies, and realized Olivia was sleeping smack-dab on my legs. Thank goodness I didn’t shoot my cat. And yes, I have a 380 Ruger close by (and a concealed weapons permit to go with it), as well as my house 9MM. I may travel alone, but mama didn’t raise no dummy.

All I can surmise about that dream is that my brain is emptying garbage: the garbage-stress of leaving behind my Florida roots, selling almost everything in my possession, buying an RV that I didn’t even know how to tow, and migrating north on strange, new roads with two senior cats who hate traveling.

The other thing I’ve learned on this journey so far is that one cannot leave a small garbage bag hanging from their RV’s rear ladder at night, no matter the good intent of bringing it to the dumpster in the morning. At some point between shooting the imaginary alien and my 6:30 am alarm, there was a slight ruckus on the roof of Junebug, a kerplunk-slash-pitter-patter of heavy feet moving about in an unorganized fashion, and finally, the fiberglass “slap” of something hard on something else hard outside the back door.

Coonies. Up I got, robe on, a quick consideration of whether or not to invite the Ruger to accompany me — nah; burglars are seldom this loud– and I fired up the exterior LEDs and braved the wilderness, only to scare a poor raccoon (or six) off into the woods while I cleaned up their mess. MY mess, actually. There’s no question of whose fault this was.

Lessons learned: Turn A/C on manual overdrive before sinking into bed each night (until I can convince my tech-savvy engineer-type brother to fly down and set the damn programming for me), don’t leave garbage outside at night, no matter how far it’s elevated above the ground, and keep the safety on the 380.

On a side note, I’m painting watercolors again. 🙂