My husband is still sleeping.  He fell asleep watching television; I did, too, but I got up and headed to bed.  He woke for a moment and said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”  I knew I’d wake up at 3 am and find the television still on along with all the lights and hear him snoring loudly.  Which I did.  And then at 5:30 the dog woke up and started to whine so off I went to open the back door and let her out and then put food in her bowl before heading back to bed and that’s when my husband came stumbling in with some words about not wanting to wake the dog in the middle of the night by coming into our bedroom and then he crawled in next to me, scooting over close so that I would spoon with him and then he fell right back into that loud snoring sleep, punctuated occasionally with a cough that sounds as if a piece of lung might hurl right up his throat.  Yuck.  Not pleasant.  Hope not too contagious since I’m next, if it is.  Yikes.  Don’t need or want that in my life.  Then the dog started barking, loud and incessant, and I knew that she had the cat backed up against a wall in the laundry room so at 6 am, my usual wake up time so I get thirty precious minutes of talk with my middle daughter every week day, I got up and quietly left our bedroom.  I put on my sweatpants outside the door so I wouldn’t wake up my husband and down I went only to discover that the dog was now outside terrorizing the cat in the dark so I had to go out on the back patio and shush her quietly since our neighbor’s bedroom window is less than twenty feet away.  Then upstairs to haul down my laptop and after a kettle of black tea left steeping, I settled down on the couch with a blanket over my lap and my feet up on the coffee table.  And here I sit hearing the birds squawking outside – wa, wa, wa – and the occasional car going by and now it’s bright out off to the east and the dog has settled down in the Morris chair off to my left after having come in and taken a big lick out of my teacup – gross – so now I’m off to wash my cup and start again and perhaps quietly head upstairs and listen and see if hubby is stirring though I doubt it since sleep is his friend now when he’s sick.  I have students most of the day and then am reading Catch 22 for another student’s paper on Tuesday.  I like that part of my work, the required reading.  I suggested this book as a third war novel for him along with The Red Badge of Courage and A Farewell to Arms.  It will, no doubt, make for an interesting comparison when we get to that point.  Alas, my day is on its way.  But now it’s time to go wash my teacup.