Last night, I woke up around four or so, needing to use the bathroom, and when I came back to my room, I had a text message from my brother, saying, “Got time to talk?”

Okay, it was 4AM, so yeah, I had time to talk. But could I? Did I want to? Really, I wanted to go back to sleep, but the Best Brother Ever wouldn’t text me in the middle of the night asking to talk unless it was important.

But if I called him, I’d have to talk in complete whispers or else I’d wake Jamie up. Our rooms are adjacent and it’s really easy to overhear conversations between them: I can basically ask him a question in a normal speaking tone and he’ll answer (during the daytime, obviously.)

Still, important, right? So I could go outside to talk to the BBE. But yesterday the side edges of Hurricane Debby were just skimming Sanford, so it had been rainy all day long. Also, of course, it would be completely dark and there’s no way Miss Sunshine would let me go outside without her. At nighttime, though, I put her on her leash, mostly to avoid wildlife interactions that might make both of us sad (aka skunks, rabid raccoons, coyotes). So I’d be juggling my phone, Sophie on her leash, in the rain and the dark… ugh, it sounded so unappealing.

And his message wasn’t, “Call me, please, it’s urgent,” so was it really so important that he would want me to be standing in the rain and dark to call?

But then it occurred to me — there’s a back room in the house that’s not currently being used. I don’t think of it as usable in the same way I think of the kitchen and living room as usable: it’s not shared space, it’s a bedroom waiting to be rented. But I could probably call from there without disturbing Jamie and obviously, I don’t think my landlord would mind if I used the spare bedroom to make a middle of the night phone call.

Perfect. Although I really would have preferred to go back to sleep, I would drag myself out of my comfortable bed and go call my brother.

And then I woke up.

The whole thing had been a dream, and I still needed to pee.

SO WEIRD! It took me a minute to convince myself that yes, I had just dreamed the bathroom visit, the text message, and the entire problem-solving thought process, but in fact, I had. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a dream that felt more realistic, and that had less of an aura of unreality about it when I woke up. I was literally dreaming that I was in bed, thinking. It felt like I’d slipped between multiverse worlds or something, that maybe in some parallel reality, the BBE actually had texted me to ask if I had time to talk.

I was honestly really tempted to call him. Or at least text him. But I didn’t, because it was 4:30 in the morning and I didn’t think he’d really want to talk to me right then either.

Instead, I went back to sleep and when I woke up, Sophie and I went for a beautiful walk down on the riverwalk. Some photographic proof:

a limpkin (a kind of bird)

I thought this bird looked so much like the night heron I posted last week that I was excited to discover that we had night herons here, too. But the Apple photos info says that it’s a limpkin. That is a word that you will have to fight with auto-correct to type. I type limpkin, auto-correct says pumpkin. Over and over again. Yeah, right, auto-correct, that bird sure looks like a pumpkin to me.

On the other hand, in an extremely cool piece of trivia, the limpkin call was used as the sound of the griffin in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and that is a fact I would never have learned if it had been a night heron. (Speaking of auto-correct, it also wants to say “heroin” every time I type “heron” and… what? I really think I’m a person more likely to write about herons, or even heroines, rather than heroin, but apparently I’m unusual enough in that for auto-correct’s default to be the hardcore drugs. Strange!)

Moving on, the construction project across the street is — oh, wait, have I mentioned that? If not, short version, they’ve taken the lovely green space and are turning it into a retention pond, which is exactly the kind of tragedy that turns people into NIMBYs. I understand the reasoning and approve in principle of proactively planning for more intense storms and potential flooding, but in practice… much sadness.

And more sadness because of the NOISE. Beep, beep, beep… please stop backing up your trucks. Just… stop. Don’t back up anymore! Go forward instead! Turn in circles!!

I strongly suspect that it’s only going to get worse, but I’m also mystified by the hours that they work. They show up, they do something, and then they disappear for two weeks. I’m not complaining, because I do think that I’m going to yearn for those disappearances long before they’re done ripping up the space and the surrounding roads, but I feel like it would be much easier to cope if I knew when they planned to work and could plan my own life accordingly. So far my coping strategy is loud music, which is good and bad, I guess, depending on the music. Not all music motivates me to work harder, but that’s what I need to find.

Speaking of which, I should get back to it. I’m jumping around all over the place in my course creation/book creation, with lots of processing of notes right now. I’ve got so much information, but it’s a struggle to keep from sounding like a term paper. I am entertaining myself with mixed metaphors, though.

In my latest section, I was writing about thinking of nutrition as basically a recipe for your body. If you want to bake chocolate chip cookies, you really can’t skip the chocolate chips. You’re not going to get chocolate chip cookies if you do. If you want to create a happy brain, you can’t skip the omega-3s and the olive oil: they are literally the ingredients that provide your brain with the building blocks to create neural connections and grow your hippocampus. No nutrients -> no connections -> shrinking hippocampus -> depression and dementia. If you want to be happy, you have to give your brain the ingredients it needs to thrive.

Here’s another one: iron is an ingredient for creating hemoglobin and hemoglobin carries oxygen throughout your bloodstream. Low iron = lower oxygen distribution = lower energy. You’ll never want to run around and have fun if your iron is low, because your body will be conserving its resources, and your conscious mind telling you to go out and get some exercise can’t win against a cautious body knowing that it doesn’t have the resources to do so.

Like I said, term paper. And probably a scientist would say that I’m oversimplifying. But simplifying to make information easier to digest and remember is where I’m at right now. (Oh, and my mixed metaphors are — is this ingredients, and a cooking metaphor? Or foundation plus building blocks, a construction metaphor? Or fuel and energy, an engine metaphor? Or maybe just all of the above, in their own places and times.)

But now I really am getting back to it!