so bright and not so bright

1895 moon bookplate available for purchase: here. 

Full moons happen once a month, but living in the often cloudy pacific northwest I don't always see it.  Tonight it's very bright and shining right into my window through a space in the tree. (If I squint I can make it hide behind a branch, but that game is only fun for so long.)

All this looking out of windows reminds me of the other night when I was up WAY TOO LATE and was so very sleepy. When I get that tired, I start hallucinating just a little bit - I'll see things or feel some phantom cat jump on the bed, but sometimes it's noises - someone calling my name, that kind of thing. It doesn't happen a lot! Just enough to freak me out when I'm super tired. On this particular night I heard a sound like a high pressure air hose -  I just put air in my tires, so that's what came to mind. Once I figured that out, I was all relieved in a ridiculous late night way: "Oh, phew! They're filling up tires behind the bar at 2AM, nothing for me to worry about." (Maybe I should note that there's a bar/tavern on the corner and thanks to the peculiar science of sound I hear a lot more back alley shenanigans than I'd like. Which would be ZERO back alley shenanigans, with maybe 3 annual exemptions for drunken Happy Birthday singing.)

Before I could get pillows over my ears to block the noise, I thought I heard something land on the roof.  NOOOOOOO! Of course I was convinced that whatever it was, it was going to explode and it would be all my fault for not doing something (my 2AM mind wasn't clear on what). By that time my poor tired brain started doing what I think is its new favorite party trick: what would scare Jen most? Let's conjure that up.  I became convinced that if I looked out the window, some horror movie scary thing (like a dinosaur, but monster-y) would slap the glass and I'd have a heart attack and fall down the stairs and die, blah blah blah. I summoned my last little shreds of reason and went to bed immediately.

The next morning there was some kind of propeller toy thing on the roof. I'm glad that a) it didn't explode, b) the drunken jackhole who sent it there is deprived of his air hose toy. I was also perversely glad that I didn't hallucinate the whole thing.