The Lack of Sleep

I am so tired that after I typed "The Lack of Sleep" my own eyes tricked me. I keyed in the title, went to stop the screaming teakettle, and came back to the screen to wonder why I had wanted to write about our lack of sheep.

Baa.

We don't have any sheep, to be sure. At this point I would trade two and a half horses for five sheep. I think it would be fair for everyone. I would no longer have to worry about barrel racing injuries or the anxieties that follow emergency room visits, or the new choices in cast colors. Similarly I could stop worrying about the price of hay, which is really what woke me up before sunrise.

Not the price of hay specifically, which is astronomical (they say because diesel is so high, it costs $10 extra per bale to use the equipment to cut down and bundle the hay, and even the string that ties the bale is a petroleum product, not like you can use it to soothe chapped lips or anything, it's just expensive twine that breaks when you're carrying a 75-pound chunk of compacted dry grass and won't break when you have to open a new bale in a hurry without scissors or your teeth, blah, blah, blah), but the price of everything.

Yup, I woke up to worry about money. More to the point, I got out of bed so that I wouldn't be lying there with money worries spinning through my head faster than a combine burns fossil fuels.

My head is logical like that.

Tonight we are hosting 17 million little girls in a pre-fairy festival extravaganza. I cracked the cleaning whip mercilessly after school yesterday so the hordes (more importantly, their mothers) shouldn't be too freaked out by the cleanliness and orderliness quotient of my house. My 120-year-old floors have been protected by an even layer of toys, laundry, books and the like for too too long. About 119 years since I mopped, I think. It was past time to expose their gleaming beauty to a bunch of extra dress-up shoes and glue and glitter.

Well, at least no one will trip on Elmo dolls or anything while we're crafting wings and painting inexplicably small wooden garden fairies.

Then the nonsleepover can commence. In the morning we have to deliver horses hither and yon, then scramble to get all the little fairy princesses into their outfits, then load up a couple of Suburbans with wings (heh heh, if Suburbans had wings, diesel would go much further) and glittery girls, then of course drive into Eugene because they don't hold Fairy Festivals in Lorane. You have to go to a college town for that.

At least the pictures will be really, really good. I know this because I can't imagine how even I could fail to get good photos in a fairground full of little girls pretending to be flower fairies.

Hello. It should be a very good break from thinking about money. And I can sleep next week, right? Because I'll be counting the sheep I got in trade for the horses.