Exhausted

At least once a week, I'll have a night where I wake up at one or two a.m. and be unable to return to sleep for several hours. Last night, I was awake from two a.m. until nearly 5:30 this morning. I can state that birds begin chirping precisely at 4:43 a.m. There is total silence, and then the chorus erupts. It's like one bird gets to be the alarm-clock bird, and after that, everybody has to be awake and chirping. Probably they have some kind of social police that comes by the nest and says, "You slept in this morning. No one heard chirping from your nest until 5:15! Slackard!"

At any rate, I am now so tired that my brain feels fuzzy. It hurts to move my eyes because they are so puffy. I'll get a nap later, but we also have a "social function" with my husband's department tonight. Yawn. I really really don't find most of the business faculty to be very interesting.

I had planned to write about teeth today. Yeah, weird subject. I've just been noticing that all these teeth-whitening endeavors are causing even really "mature" people to sport abnormally gleaming choppers. My teeth are the way nature intended after a lifetime of coffee and tea, so of course, in comparison, I look like someone who never brushes her teeth. I actually go beyond the norm in tooth care. I brush at least twice daily, I floss at least once daily, and I have my teeth cleaned every three months. But the one time I tried whitening them (with a product I got from the dentist for $300), about all the change I noticed was my gums getting really sensitive and irritated. The color of my teeth did not change appreciably. Of course, I could get those enamel overlays that one of the weather forecasters locally has done. I don't know if that process is like reroofing your house, where you're supposed to remove the old shingles before putting on the new ones if you have more than one layer of shingles on the roof already. This woman is developing such a build-up of overlays that her teeth protrude past her lips. She's about 50 years old, and her teeth are so huge and white that she's getting rather equine in looks. (Think of a horse or donkey pulling its lips back to whinny or neigh.)

We've got to make plans for our trip to Louisiana. We're going to go to Fayetteville first to spend Stephen's birthday with him. He may or may not accompany us to West Monroe. Heather just lost her grandmother, and she's having to go out of state to a conference (leaving today, returning on the 29th, I think), so I don't know if he'll want to be apart from her. We'll see.

More later, if my head clears.