the wee hours

She usually wakes me up by barking.

Most days, around or about 1:30am, almost exactly to the hour. She is barking at something outside or in the kitchen. I'm hoping it is small animals (outside and maybe inside too) and not the ghosts my mother in law seems to believe inhabit my house.

I then try to fall back asleep for the next 4 hours. We sleep with the radio on, which is counter productive to sleep to be honest. The only station that comes in without interference is WRKO. Which locals know is a conservative news/talk radio program.

From 1am to 5am they used to run the fantastic George Noory and his Coast to Coast AM program. Doug and I have been listening to that program for years, even back to when Art Bell was the host.

That program moved over to a (if you can believe it) even MORE conservative radio station, which (thankfully) we don't get here in our house. If I want to listen to George Noory and learn about Planet X and the Shadow People and government conspiracies, I have to come in here and fire up the interwebs.

Most of the time, Noory's programs keep me awake and sometimes even scare me. I am such a weirdo.

Now they run a program called Red Eye Radio, hosted by a guy named Doug McIntyre. He claims to be conservative but I think he's actually more libertarian than most of your conservative gas bags on the air. He's funny, he lets people talk until they become just downright stupid or bizarre and nonsensical. He loses his temper when people are stupid, which is fantastic and it makes me laugh.

So I usually do not fall back asleep right off the bat. Sometimes, I don't fall back asleep and Geoff's 5:15 alarm goes off and he gets in the shower to get ready for school.

This morning, she missed the barking alarm. Not sure if all the play outside yesterday wore her out and she was able to sleep. But I managed to not be wide awake at 1:30am.

Instead, she started barking at 4:30am. And now I'm up for the day.

It is (so far) the coldest day we've had yet this winter. Our furnace is not behaving well, so my bedroom was cold. I knew that if my bedroom was as cold as it was, the woodstove room had to be insufferable. I went downstairs to stop Brodie from barking (she ran upstairs and jumped into my spot in bed. Nice). And the woodstove room was a balmy 36 degrees. Outside, it is just under 0 degrees.

I figured, being up for the day, it is time to fire the woodstove and get her cranking for the rest of the family. It is time to put laundry in the washer and the dryer. It is time to make coffee. It is time for a journal entry. I've managed to do all of the above and now wish I could go back to sleep, but I think there is a nap in my afternoon, not back in bed for right now. Gotta man the woodstove and keep her going. The wood we brought in yesterday is very cold/damp from being outside in the shed. We have a bunch of wood in the kitchen that we use to get the fire started, and then the outside stuff comes in throughout the winter. I'm tempted to just use more of the drier wood today but we have our system and I should stick to it.

Being this cold inside makes me think of people outside in it. From the homeless to soldiers and Boy Scouts learning cold weather survival, this is the time of year I do not wish the outdoors upon anyone.