Nocturnal attack

I've always been a champion sleeper. 9 times out of 10 I'm asleep before my head even hits the pillow. I've been known to take naps in the back seat of my car or drift off on very bumpy Mexican bus rides.

I owe this unique ability to my personal greed. As a kid my sister and I would always go down to Utah and spend a week with my awesome cousins. We'd all converge on my grandma's house and go a little crazy. Just the thought of taking care of 7 kids under the age of 10 kind of gives me the shakes.

Anyway, somewhere along the way they started promising a dollar to the cousin who fell asleep first. Well, if anyone knows anything about me, the best motivation for anything is competition with a monetary reward. I was out like a light.

The early life conditioning has served me well. When other people complain of insomnia I scrunch up my face, tilt my head slightly to the right and sympathetically nod. I think, "oh, that must be horrible" but really I can't relate. Except last night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't immediately fall back to sleep.


There I laid on my back staring up at the ceiling in my dark room. A few moments later I noticed a faint green, blurry light up near the top of the room. As I fixed on it it seemed to slowly move across the empty expanse above my bed. Now, I'm a West-coast girl through and through and I've never seen a firefly. So, in my middle of the night, no vision correcting contact delirium I figure that this is a firefly. But not only is it a normal firefly, this is some kind of really horrible bloodsucking firefly from hell that is about to land on my neck and give me Lyme disease. Just as my heart rate is beginning to quicken and I'm pulling up my sheet to protect my face, the ear doctor rolled over.

Excitedly, I realized that he probably wasn't asleep either and would totally love to help protect me from the scary, slowly floating ominous insect OF DOOM.


In a quiet but urgent voice, I asked him, "babe, do you see that weird green light on the ceiling. What is that?"


He grunted rolled back over and looked at it, replying, "huh?"


"That light, up there, it's moving." I answered


Bleary eyed he looked up again and flatly said, "Katie, its the smoke detector."


...

...

...

"Oh, sorry about that"


I could almost feel his eyes roll through the darkness.


For a few minutes I laid there, staring at the blurry little green dot and realized he was right. Immediately the dot ceased its slow circular movements and I realized I'd woken my husband in the middle of the night, scared by an inanimate object. I had been terrified by the green dot of a light from the smoke detector.


Perhaps it's time to invest in lasik eye surgery?