It's 4:30 a.m.

For some reason, I keep waking up at this hour. Last night, I was lying with the window open -- keeps the a/c from kicking in when I have a hot flash, heh -- listening to things howling in the woods . . . listening, analyzing, cataloguing . . . . Way off in the background was chorus of high-pitched yipping -- definitely coyotes, probably a pack cruising along the creek bottom. Somewhere in the middle distance, a couple of dogs were bravely defending their homesteads from the coyotes -- from the safety of their porches, no doubt. But in the foreground, there was something incredibly loud, repetitious, and wrong.

So, there I lay, at 4:30, combing through my sound archives. Fox? Nah. Coyote? No. Dog? Nope. Barred Owl? Weeeeeell, kind of similar, but an octave or two too high . . . wait a minute . . . oh, riiiiiight.

I'd almost forgotten. When Himself was next door the other day, putting the finishing touches on the pen he built for our neighbor's Zombie Livestock, he noticed that Ol' Alvin had bought himself four -- yes, four -- brand spanking new roosters, all of which were now running loose in a pen made to hold cattle. Sure enough, when he was there again two days ago, he noticed that one had already gone missing. I'm pretty sure I know where it was yesterday -- at fucking 4:30 in the morning.

If Mr. Rooster is out there now, he's drowning. The only thing I can hear at the moment is the steady drone of this:

(No, I don't know why it's blurry, but it's 4:30 -- Everything's blurry at 4:30!)
Okay, that and Himself snoring. For a minute, I thought somebody had a truck stuck out on the road somewhere. Maybe with a wheel in the ditch or something? Y'know, what with all this rain. "brrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmrrrr . . . rrrrmmmmmbrrrrrrrrrr . . . brmbrmbrrrrrrrrrrr . . ."

Oh, yeah. I'm gonna be real perky in the morning.