Good morning...

It's that thing I was talking about yesterday... no sleep.

My father and his wife have a small, one level home. It has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, kitchen, den and laundry closet. There is no basement. There is no attic. I would venture to guess it is all of about 1000 sq. ft.

In this tiny home, where four of us now live, they have three landline phones. Three. Now, keep in mind that it takes about two seconds to walk from one end of the house to the other. Yet, they have three phones. One in the kitchen. One in their bedroom. One in the den. The den and the kitchen are only separated by the living room. And, okay, I can see their logic. It actually makes sense because, if you are working at the computer in the den, it is sorta annoying to get up and go to another area of the house to answer the phone, say like the kitchen. Or, if you are in the heated moment of passion in your bedroom and the phone rings and you feel over-compelled to stop in the middle of the excitement to answer the phone, then you don't have to run butt-naked through the house to do so.

So yes, there is conceivable logic there. I get it.

What I don't get is that these three phones are turned up to 8000 decibels and when someone calls it sounds as if there are a gazillion phones. It is so loud that I jump out of my skin every time it happens - which, thank god, is not very often because their social life is limited to church and family, for the most part, so there are not a lot of extraneous friends just calling to say hi. The sound reverberates through the house with such intensity it seems that every single window is going to shatter

It is so unpleasant when that happens at 11:19 pm when I seemed to be sleeping well after very little sleep the night before.

Damn!

So, here I sit... at the computer since 3:09am when I finally rolled my ass out of bed after laying there in that unfulfilling space between sleep and wakefulness for almost four hours. And... god help me... it is going to be a long day.