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Dolly and the Night Spirits

A re-post from April of 2012 and another of my blogs, now closed down, as we fondly remember our girl, Dolly.

Yesterday, at almost 2:30 AM, I was in my office rebooting the modem because we had no Internet.  No; there is no alarm on our system that goes off, waking me up, if the Internet goes down.  No; I have no sixth sense that nudges me from sleep if our connection to the rest of the planet dissolves… in fact I’d have been blissfully unaware of the networking failure were it not for some dog being stuck in non-stop barking mode.

It is warm enough now that we have gone back to sleeping with the bedroom windows open, so we hear more of what goes on outside at night. Marie is able to sleep through such disturbances – I am not. Dolly was trying to sleep and would occasionally go to the window to shout, “Would you PLEASE hush up!” then curl back into her snuggle bed in the corner with a grumble to try and get back to sleep. I am a light sleeper (or so I thought).  Once I am fully awake (for any reason) I will not get back to sleep; I might as well fire up the coffee pot and find something productive to do.

Dolly Settles In

This article was actually written in 2008, lost in a computer crash, and resurrected when I found it again on a web site – complete with my photos.  So I saved the photos and text back to my hard drive and will post the story here as a Wayback Whensday post.  Especially since Dolly recently passed away and we are focusing on remembering the good times we all shared.  And yes, I am now doing a weekly back-up of my hard drives!


This weekend we have been officially moving into the new house.  I began facilitating this move on Friday by bringing over a couple truck loads of boxes of stuff from our storage room and stashing it in the big closet that will serve at our storage room in the new place.

We have been mindful of the advice often offered which says that if you have boxes of stuff from your last move that have never been opened, you should just throw them out and not move them again. But, while we have not (often) opened most of these boxes, we know what’s in them and don’t want to toss (most of) what’s in them.

Dolly

Awakened in the night by the need to urinate, I slide my legs over the edge of the bed. Instinctively I glance down, looking for the black and white blur, in my myopic vision, of Dolly’s sleeping form in the dim glow of the hallway nightlight. Dolly has taken to sleeping next to the bed. This started during storms; rain makes her nervous, thunder terrifies her and she seeks solace by snuggling up next to the bed where I can drape an arm over and scratch her ears. Lately she starts out sleeping on her snuggle bed in the corner of the bedroom, but after we’ve gone to sleep slinks over and curls up as close to me as she can get.