Late Again

Instead of turning to fog, the evening haze rose up and dissipated, leaving a clear sky for the stars. Later, a few wispy clouds formed to greet the waning crescent of moon which had barely cleared the treetops before the soft glow it cast over night was outshone by the brash porch light of my early rising neighbor. Earlier, I saw a single meteor streak toward Mount Lassen. I don't know if any animals visited during the three hours when I took yet another unintentional nap. The chair is too comfy. The room was too cold, as well, and I grabbed a blanket to use as a lap robe. This led to an unprecedented event. The last cat has lived here for more than a dozen years, and has never sat on my lap until tonight. She found the soft blanket irresistible, and hopped up to knead it for several minutes. I've seldom been more surprised.

The cold has felt more intense following yesterday's balmy air. The plunge was extreme, and makes me suspect that the brief false spring is coming to an end. Most likely, the prematurely blooming flowers have suffered from the chill tonight. Another such night and they will begin to turn brown. I suppose there's a lesson there, too obvious to be mentioned.

Look! I didn't turn Sluggo off before five o'clock. In fact, I didn't turn him on until after five o'clock, when I woke from the unintended nap. I'll turn him off now, before the sun sneaks its early glow above the horizon. I don't know what's becoming of my schedule. The weather has set a bad example for me, I guess.

Too Soon

Day is all barking squirrels, chattering birds, cat fights, and the sound of a rake somewhere. What is there to rake this time of year? I'm awake early again. Whoever keeps moving things into the long-vacant house next door was there again this morning, making noise. For almost a year, they have come about once a week, putting things in that house, and yet nobody ever moves in. Today, they woke me a few times, but I settled back into sleep after each, until their voices, distorted in a dream to become a discussion I was overhearing, (about a movie of which someone disapproved, it seemed, and my dream self was trying to figure out if I was listening to people who were actually present or to the disembodied voices of a talk radio show) took on a tone I found distressing, and this finally brought me fully awake. Then there was the closing of car doors and the noise of engines and departure. They had vanished by the time I had gotten my windows open. It was barely noon. Now I feel oddly displaced under this hazy sky the color of a bright pearl reflecting blue water. I keep wishing I were somewhere else, or maybe just still asleep. It's time to figure out what to do with the rest of yet another unexpected day.

Prick

Recently, I've read several journal entries in which the writers speak of having had their interest in one thing or another peaked. Surely, though interest itself can peak (for example, as when interest in disco peaked in the 1970s), one's own interest can only be piqued. There is an intransitive verb to peak, meaning "to grow sickly and pale," from which we take the adjective peaked (two syllables), as in "You're looking a bit peaked." But the transitive verb I've always used when I've wanted to express the arousal of interest in something is pique. I've looked it up, and found that it comes from the French verb piquer meaning "to prick." The noun, of course denotes resentment, or a fit of dudgeon, but the verb to pique denotes the arousal of something, through some challenge or provocation. Resentment, anger, interest, curiosity, can all be piqued. I like the word, not least because of its close relative, the adjective piquant. Once denoting something stinging or disagreeably sharp, it now denotes something agreeably stimulating to the palate, or, via the wonder of metaphor, something engagingly provocative. To have one's interest piqued is much better than to have it peaked, in any case. Once your interest in something has reached a peak, there's nowhere for it to go but down. That would make anyone sickly and pale. One would then need some piquant stimulation, that they might no longer be so peaked.