Into the gloaming
Ah, spring! When the pussywillows start popping, when the temperature hits 60 degrees, when yours truly spends days upon days upon days raking the yard to remove last fall’s dump of dead leaves and a winter’s worth of dawg poop. What? Surprised about us not picking up the poop during the winter? Hey! YOU try spending the extra few minutes to pick up dawg poop when it’s 20 below zero, there’s snow on the ground, and the dawg poop sinks into the snow because it’s so warm in comparison and it suddenly becomes a major excavation project to pick up the poop.
Just sayin’.
Anyway, I have been raking and soaking in the sunlight and warmth (we almost broke into the top ten highest temps for April today!), and loving it. Oooh, yeah, gimme that Vitamin D, bay-bee!
OmegaDad, on the other hand, has rediscovered the one bad side to spring/summer in Alaska.
The Gloaming.
Last night, the dotter needed to snuggle with me in bed because she had watched something ER-esque on the TV at the neighbor’s house. Apparently, there was lots of surgery, requiring lots of blood, lots of shouting, and generally unnerving stuff for her. So I settled into bed with her and a book, and then fell asleep.
This left poor OmegaDad seeking another place to sleep. (The dotter is too big now for all three of us to sleep well if she sneaks or is invited into bed with us.)
So he trotted out to the living room, blankie and pillow in hand, and snuggled up on the sofa.
Only to get all of about four hours’ of sleep last night, because of The Gloaming.
Yes, we have entered the time of year when we have lost all deep darkness at night; the time when the sunrise/sunset calculators that display twilight times now show “light” for astronomical twilight. In two weeks, the calendar suddenly displays “light” instead of twilight times for nautical twilight. Then, in the first weeks of June, civil twilight suddenly disappears and the calendars display “light” for that interval.
So The Gloaming is just beginning. (Ooooh, a cute little itty-bitty baby Gloaming!) It doesn’t bother me one bit; I can sleep through just about anything. But any hints of light around OmegaDad make him sleep poorly; it’s just the way he’s built. Our bedroom curtains block a certain amount of light, so it won’t bother him there for another month, but in the living room/kitchen area, we have three windows that have no coverings at all, and The Gloaming creeps in on crepuscular feet.
(Isn’t that a great word? “Crepuscular”. It, and “gloaming”, are actual real live words that are actually applied to this exact situation. One thing I have loved about living in Alaska is that I get to use these words to refer to Real Live Environmental Conditions! Woot!)
