I used to hate nights like that...

I've always heard they come more often when you get older.  You just wake up - no reason, nothing wrong, you're just awake.  And maybe you'll be able to go back to sleep in an hour and maybe you won't.

So I woke up, and the late crescent moon was just rising which put it somewhere in the wee hours.  From my first month here the moon always seemed more significant somehow, as if it were brighter than anywhere I'd lived before.  I can't really see how that could be true,  but it is so that with no coronal light from cities - "light pollution," as some call it," the night sky is quite vivid.  When the moon isn't in the sky the Milky Way is spectacular.  So it could have been the moon that woke me, I don't know.

Sometimes I'd have nights like this when I lived in the city, and it always got on my nerves.  Like it was an inversion of nature or something - it's night, I should be asleep.  And I knew I'd be a zombie the next morning, because that ol' alarm clock didn't care if I'd gotten a full night's sleep.  But I go to sleep early here, usually, so even at 1:30 in the morning I'd already had the best part of a night's sleep and if I was awake, I was.  No big deal.  Maybe I'd go back to sleep in an hour, maybe not.  Didn't really matter.  Ghost wanted out, of course, because when Uncle Joel gets up that's what he wants.  And Little Bear, who's not allowed out at night because he doesn't always come back and he's very hard to find in the dark, figured it was time for his full-contact belly rub.  Click saw no reason a little thing like my wakefulness should disturb her own nap, for which she wanted a bed-warmer but I wasn't required to be asleep to fulfill that function.  So I lay back down and read for an hour, during which at some point Ghost wanted back in.  And then I turned out the light and tried to go back to sleep, but just drowsed off and on.  And of course then I did sleep until bright sun hit my eyes.  And so of course now I'm two hours behind schedule, but the schedule is never very important these days.

It's a bit annoying because I really was planning to be at the Lair first light - I've still got a little final digging to do and that's best done before it warms up.  But no big deal.  Hardly the first time I didn't do something on the "to-do" list, and I kinda like nights like that now.