Terrible night

Boy did I have an awful night last night! First of all, I should have gone to bed a little earlier than I did, which was around 11:30p. I fell asleep pretty easily and around 3 am I was awakened by barking dogs. This is fairly unusual. There is a dog who barks its brains out across the street, but I typically don't hear that one (unless of course the mailman is on his rounds), especially at night. These are chocolate labs that live right beside the house that is directly behind us. Anyway, the barking dog(s) woke me up. I was quite annoyed, but I figured it would stop soon and I could go back to sleep. It didn't stop. It wasn't constant, like rapid-fire barking, or anything, but it was frequent enough that I couldn't fall back asleep AND it sounded like it was right under my bedroom window. We've had several friends through the years who have lived next to barking nightmares and I have always felt bad for them and wondered how I would repsond to something like that. Well, I got to see how I would respond last night, and let me tell you, it was NOT good! Around 3:20 I got up out of bed, stuck my head against the screen and yelled "QUIET!" I'm sure if there were any neighbors laying awake like I was, they got a chuckle out of that. It actually worked, but only for about 20 minutes. The barking resumed and I continued to get more and more annoyed. If I knew the people that live there, I would have been tempted to give them a call. Around 4 am I attempted once again to silence the barking by yelling out the window. Unfortunately it didn't work this time, and only made matters worse. I made one last attempt at hollering out the window, and when it failed again I gave up on that. By 4:30 I decided to try shutting the windows to see if that would help. It didn't. I guess it helped in that it didn't sound like the dog was underneath my bedroom window, but in the neighbors yard, which of course is where it was. Since this is really the first time this has happened, I didn't want to call the police or any drastic thing like that because who knows what the situation was? Maybe they had to leave home for an emergency and had to put the dogs outside? I doubt that, but I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I finally had to get up and get some cotton to stick in my ears. I did finally fall asleep and probably got a whole 4 hours of sleep. Needless to say, I've been dragging a bit today! I'm praying that this doesn't happen again tonight. I might not be as tolerant tonight!?

Scott and Gage made it home around lunchtime today from their big weekend of hunting. Gage seems to have had a good time. He didn't come home as completely exhausted as he did last year, so that was good! Scott was here a whole 8 hours and has left again. He went back to Tuttle to hunt again. I have TONS of things to do this week in preparation for Gage's party on Friday so it would have been nice to have a little help. (I'm not bitter at all, can you tell?)

Here are a few pictures Scott downloaded from his camera. (I apologize for the sideways ones but I don't know how to rotate them? My camera usually does it automatically.)

Gage all hidden in his blind. He told me this was much more pleasant than when we went goose hunting when we nearly died of heat exhaustion in our body bags!

Hmmmm..............can you guess what's for supper?

In the background you can see that I sent our telescope with Scott and Gage so that they could do some of the things required for the astronomy belt loop and pin for Cub Scouts. Gage was all excited to tell me that he located and identified 4 constellations and the north star!