I Hate Nights Like Last Night

Nights when I can't for the life of me fall asleep.  I got home from knitting just before 9:30, visited with Durwood, did a bit of reading, and went to bed around 11-ish.  I wrote my nightly prompt page, turned out the light, and my eyes kept springing open.  Durwood got up for his first middle of the night cup of tea and half donut around 1:30 and I was still wide awake.  I decided to just get up, dammit, and use the time.  So I finished Sudoku Maize #9 and cast on and knit about 6 rows of Sudoku Almond #6.  By then it was 3 o'clock and I was still feeling like I could stay up all night so I popped a Benedryl (which always makes me sleepy) and tried again.  I guess it still took me close to half an hour to fall asleep.

Naturally today's the day Durwood and I meet his Census 2000 pals for breakfast at 9:30 and I fortunately woke up to whiz at 8:15 so I woke him up, we hurried into our duds and hotfooted it across town to arrive right on time.  Whew.  I feel like I could sleep but I'm afraid if I lay down now, I won't be able to sleep again tonight and I DO NOT want a repeat.

I gathered up all the Sudoku squares this morning and sorted out the ones that needed their tails woven in and took them to breakfast with me so that after I was done eating I could do that boring task while the talk flew around the table.  I got all but four of them done there and finished the last ones when we got home.  I laid out all the squares in the order of the upper left block of the puzzle solution and I think it's going to look good.  From now on I'll weave in the tails as I knit the squares so I won't have 15 of them to do at once.  Anything I can do to make me not push the project aside because I don't want to do the next step is a good thing.

My knitting friend KW just got back from 2 1/2 weeks in Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands.  In Iceland they have yarn, good wool yarn, Lopi yarn in the grocery store.  This is the yarn department IN A GROCERY STORE.  Could you die?  I might need to go there.

September 12--Tom Collicott, Fruits of Your Labors.  It was very nice penmanship, even lines of script marched across the painting.  Not Palmer method with its rounded vowels and soft-bellied Bs and Ds, more likely it was copperplate, the spiky script of the days when reading and writing were crafts not everyone pursued, when scribes plied their trade in markets and public houses scraping a living putting other men's words down on paper.

Then I closed my notebook, turned out the light, and didn't fall asleep for about four hours.  Arrgh.
--Barbara