I Sure Could Use Bertha About Now

I know its all in my head at this point, but that doesn’t mean its not a real thing. Here’s the deal…I can’t sleep without Pam. It has been this way for years. Whenever I have to travel on business without her, no matter how luxuriously comfortable the hotel, I toss and turn all night. On the few occasions when she goes somewhere and leaves me here at the house the same thing happens. I go to bed at the normal hour feeling a normal amount of sleepiness. I turn out the lights and get into bed and then my eyes pop open like the eyes of one of those ventriloquist dummies. After what seems like an hour or so of tossing and turning I eventually drift off in an uneven and fretful sleep which eventually ends some time between 3 and 4 in the wee hours when I wake up for good. This morning when it happened I laid there in the darkness trying to make up a Dad Joke. I actually came up with a decent one…

You hear about the house that went up for sale right across the street from a grizzly bear preserve?

The Realtor described it this way: This place has great cub appeal….

Now that I see it written out, maybe my use of the word decent was optimistic. Luckily, I have put these sleepless nights to good use. It has allowed me to spend lots of time writing. I’ve been working off and on on my fourth novel for over a year now. It is a complicated story with a lot of moving parts and consequently difficult. But I have found that I do some of my best writing at 3 in the morning. It’s coming along quite nicely.

What I really need right now is Bertha, the window fan of death. Long time readers of The Tempest will remember her, the homemade box window fan that my father built and installed in my bedroom window when I was a child, a mere five feet from the spot where I laid down my head every night. It was like going to sleep on an airport runway. But sleep I did. A friend of mine sent me a picture out of the blue a couple days ago with the caption…Bertha’s Distant Cousin

Much fancier than Bertha but definitely from the same family.

In case you missed the original Bertha post… https://doug-thetempest.blogspot.com/2012/09/bertha-window-fan-of-death.html