SLEEPING TIGER--HIDDEN DRAGON

28 November 2001

Let sleeping tigers lie. That would be me. I had to reboot the computer this evening and while it was rebooting, sat down to watch the end of Jeopardy. Next thing I know, it's 8:15 and Walt is shaking me to ask what (if anything) I was going to do about dinner (or, more accurately, what he should do about his dinner).

I struggled to my feet and was greeted by an ecstatic dog, who could only see "dinner!" in my coming to life.

She continued to run around whining and yapping while I staggered to the bathroom to answer nature's call. Then back out to the eternally happy dog, who could only think of food.

As I got the can of dog food in my hands to open it, she continued whining and jumping in happy anticipation. Walt started doing an immitation of her and I yelled at both of them to just shut up.

The dog was too excited smelling the dog food to notice, but Walt looked like I'd just slapped him.

Which, in a manner of speaking, I had.

I am really good at getting by on little amounts of sleep. And I have learned to cat nap--if I have 20-30 minutes of sleep, I can get up and continue on with what I was doing when I collapsed.

But give me an hour and 15 minutes, and it's just long enough to be soundly asleep, and not long enough to have gotten enough sleep. I wake up feeling drugged and it takes me awhile to start to feel human again.

While I'm staggering around trying to feel human, don't jump up and down, whining and yapping at me, whether on four feet, or two. I need a little time to pass through the brain fog, which is what I'm trying to do as I write this.

Rice is cooking in the rice cooker and I can smell garlic. That means it's time for me to do something creative with hamburger. I just hope when I go out into the kitchen and open the meat drawer and get out a hunk of meat, Walt isn't going to start jumping up and down, whining and yapping.

Incidentally, the brain fog was so thick that I couldn't come up with the phrase "let sleeping dogs lie," so I did what I normally do when faced with some lapse in memory--I went to Google. I put in "let sleeping lie" and was interested in the list that popped up:

Let sleeping dolls lie
Let sleeping mummies lie
Let sleeping babies lie
Let sleeping demons lie
Let sleeping coons lie
Let sleeping corpses lie
Let sleeping tsars lie
Let sleeping files lie
Let sleeping teens lie
Let sleeping lions lie
Let sleeping cats lie
Let sleeping ships lie
Let sleeping dustbunnies lie (my personal favorite!)
Let sleeping werewolves lie

 ...obviously, the watchword is...if it's sleeping, let it lie.