sleep

I feel like I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. First, it was the nightly crazy storms. Every night for over a week the heavens let loose on Kyiv – rain and sometimes hail, tree-bending (and sometimes breaking) winds, loud thunder and bright lightening. One night, there was such a loud CRACK in the middle of the night, before the rain started, that I actually thought something had exploded near my apartment building. At first I thought maybe it was a firework; after all, it had been a few days since we’d had a salut in Kyiv, which is a weekly, sometimes twice a week, event. But it was awful late for fireworks, I thought, and they aren’t usually set off right outside my window. “Maybe somebody finally had enough of the Bitchy Turtle Brigade* at the supermarket next door and blew it up.” I fell asleep with a small smile, content with the thought that the People had taken revenge on that horrible place. (I was a bit disappointed the next morning to see the supermarket still standing, and to hear on the news that it was just an especially strong storm that had been kicked off by the really loud thunder burst.)

Then the mosquitos started attacking in force at night, their annoying buzzing keeping me awake. I finally found a thing you plug into an outlet and the mystery liquid inside heats up and releases some mystery aroma that keeps the little devils away. It’s probably slowly killing me in my sleep, too, but I’ll die without a mosquito bite!

Then there are the nights, like last night, when the cat gets a burst of energy and wants to play. She tears through the apartment, leaping on and over me in her madness. Early this morning she decided she wanted company, so she started attacking my hand in a vain attempt to get me to play with her. When that didn’t work, she attacked my foot. That definitely got me up and out of bed, but in no mood to play with her at all. She has wisely moved to the balcony for a quiet morning meditation in the early sunlight.

*The Bitchy Turtle Brigade are the oh-so-lovely team of young ladies who work at the neighborhood supermarket. They work with the speed of a dying turtle, but if you should not be sacking up your groceries at the speed of lightening, they will yell at you. They will also yell at you if you don’t have exact change (in fact, sometimes you have to actually show them them contents of your wallet to prove you don’t have it), if you take too long trying to find exact change, and if you don’t move out of way fast enough so she can start yelling at the next customer.