You have to understand that after a bone-chilling winter and a nearly non-existent spring, the weather has suddenly changed. Leaves are on the trees, bulb-flowers are blooming, and the whole world smells like lilacs. Which means, of course, that the birds are out.
During the spring, if I try to go to bed anytime near 3:00 in the morning, which often happens on weekends when I'm up late writing or anytime I have a paper due, the birds keep me awake. They start chirpping and singing and screeching around 3:15 a.m. and continue until about 7:30 a.m. After that the noise falls off considerably as the little bastards have tired themselves out. But between 3:15 and 7:30 a.m., if I'm not wearing earplugs, I'm being serenaded into insanity.
Sunday I go to bed somewhere around 1:00 a.m. (late Saturday night, for those who cannot read clocks), fully and totally expecting to walk the floors a few times but sleep until about 9:00. This plan works perfectly except for one thing: I have the windows open.
I'm not really sure how I can be so stupid to leave the windows open. Maybe it's because the weather combined with my propensity for violent and constant menopausal hot flashes deems open windows to be a necessity. I turn the fan on low to provide extra breezes and also to give me that illusion of white noise. I don't even hear the trains going by anymore, so I figure that unless a whopper of a thunderstorm rolls through, I'm good to sleep for a while.
But one eye pops open at 4:20 a.m. Do I have to pee? Am I too cold? Too hot? Is the fan not working? Did College Boy fall out of bed? Do I need a mini chocolate cupcake that's hiding in the fridge?
None of the above.
It's the birds. The freaking, shrieking birds.
I close one of the windows. I turn the fan up as high as it will go to make it as loud as it will get. I put a pillow over my head. I get up and close the other window and put another pillow over my head. All I can hear is that damn extremely loud, extremely vocal, extremely persistent bird. I decide to stay in bed until 5:00 a.m., and if I'm still awake then, I'll get up. I doze off right before 5:00 and wake up at 6:00 to the sound cutting through the glass like feather-billed diamonds. Pillow over my head, covers pulled up (hot flashes be damned), I manage to doze until about 7:15. At this point I decide that I might as well get the hell up.
The bad news is that these birds and their little babies are so loud and so obnoxious that sleep will elude me for many mornings to come. The good news is that it seems to calm down quite a bit within a few weeks as other animals, equally annoyed by the little chickies, start picking the birdies off like snipers.
Oh well. Staying up late on a Sunday night. It's almost midnight. I'll let you know how well I sleep in the morning... as long as the birds don't start their crap within the next fifteen to twenty minutes. I'm up around 5:00, anyway. Who knows? Maybe I'll stick my head out the window and wake THEIR asses up for a change.
Now THAT would be FUN.
