Gray

This morning, the sky has decided to look like winter. All night, the clouds thickened and the moon grew less distinct, its light less direct, until everything was a shadowless glow. Now the early morning light reveals massy gray clouds which admit no shaft of dawn. The birds are subdued. A single, silent jay perches on the highest utility wire, watching the gray east.


I slept a bit last night, though never for long. There is no comfortable sleeping position when your neck goes awry. I think I'm beginning to show the effects of missing solid blocks of sleep. Concentration grows more difficult, and errors multiply in every task. The headache is sometimes more intense, sometimes less. I don't like the light. I'm glad it's a gray morning.

Dampened

We've gotten a few sprinkles this evening. I've read that there's been real rain in the northwest, so maybe we'll get some here as well, though we seem to be out on the edge of the weather system. It's quite cool, and fewer crickets are chirping. I haven't heard Johann for a couple of nights now. Perhaps, having fertilized one female's eggs, he's decided to move on to some other spot in hopes of finding another female. Or maybe he's quiet because he's exhausted. Or maybe I drove him away when I watered the sourgrass the other night. Anyway, there are no crickets nearby anymore.

Whatever has been causing my recent discomfort is very strange. I'm beginning to think that it is not just something brought on by my neck being out of place. The symptoms are too odd. For one thing, they're not constant as one would expect from a displaced vertebra. They come and go, and move around a lot. It seems more like a viral infection of some sort, and the neck displacement may have been minor and coincidental.

In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that it might be the onset of another bout of shingles. I had one about a dozen years ago, and it was a decidedly unpleasant experience. Stupid chicken pox. Everybody gets vaccinated for that nowadays, don't they? Nobody did when I was a kid, so almost everybody I knew got the chicken pox at one time or another. Not everybody I know has gotten shingles yet, though.

Well, whatever happens, I guess. It's sure annoying not to get sleep in anything longer than four hour blocks, though.