Early Riser

Usually I sleep soundly, only waking a minute or two before my alarm clock goes off (or when it goes off). There are some rare occasions where I wake extra early or even in the middle of the night. Last night was one of them.

I must have had a lot on my mind, because I woke up with lots of thoughts running around in my head. I lay there for a while, thinking I might go back to sleep. I didn't. I tried all of the normal things: praying, quoting Bible verses, etc. I still didn't fall back to sleep.

So I looked at the clock. It was 4:38 a.m.

Now the tricky thing about waking up early, but not actually in the middle of the night, is that you begin to think of things you might do if you actually got up early (instead of just laying there). Getting up an hour or two early is not out of the question (as opposed to the middle of the night where you have time to wait to fall back to sleep and will still get enough sleep to make the effort worthwhile).

So I thought it through. If I were to persist in trying to fall back to sleep I would either 1) get an extra hour or so of sleep in or 2) lay there awake till my alarm clock went off. I'm really not running short on sleep, but I haven't had very much time (awake) at home this week.

Then I thought about the garden. I had noticed the night before (in the process of mowing the lawn and watering the plants) that there were lots of tomatoes getting ripe. But it was full dark before I was done with the mowing and watering, so I hadn't picked any the night before. Then I thought about the fact that it would be at least Wednesday next week (probably Thursday) before I would really have time to do anything about it. As I thought about all of the effort that went into growing the garden, I considered allowing some of those tomatoes to get to the unusable stage as more and more of a bad thing. Wasteful actually.

So I got up, took a flashlight and picked tomatoes in the dark. Then I cooked one large pot of tomatoes and put another large bowl in the fridge (where hopefully they will keep long enough for me to get around to cooking them up). It was lots of fun.

Not that I didn't enjoy myself, but I do hope I don't feel moved to get up around 4:30 a.m. to pick tomatoes in the dark very often.

Professional Help

Well we finally did it. We got professional help...with our mole problem that is.

The Mole Man did a good job. He came in, set-up the trap, and after the initial "new customer" fee only charges for each mole caught. He caught two of the little critters in the first week. I didn't know two could do so much damage.

Now if we ever spot an active mound again, we can call him and he will be back to render assistance. Hurrah!

I cannot tell you how this relieves my mind. It is hard when you have a tiny creature that is destroying hours of work overnight, every night. The runs will have to be filled in somehow, or else we will have a plethora of ankle twisting dips in our lawn. But just knowing that there won't be new ones appearing each night is so nice!

On another note, I see that my last post was about lawn mowing. Ironically, that is exactly what I plan to do this evening!

Curious. I wonder if there is any deeper meaning to be learned from that? Do thoughts of mowing the lawn make me want to blog? Very curious indeed.