Sleepnessless, Squirrels, SEC, and Spooks

Earlier today (yesterday?), like usual, I got home from school, ate some food, goofed off on the Internet for a bit, then started some schoolwork.  Today it was Chinese, since there's homework due and a quiz on these words on Friday.  Unlike usual, as I was working on my homework I decided to take a short nap and finish it later.  And as what always happens when I decide to take a "short" nap, I wake up 4&1/2 hours later to find it's 10:15pm and barely any of my homework is finished.  Did this affect my ability to sleep tonight?  Yes.  Once 1:00am rolled around, I was still wide awake...ruh roh! So after and hour and a half of trying to go to sleep, I decided to just go sit on the futon and blog on my laptop.  It's now 3:00am.  Hopefully that 1/3 dose of NyQuil will kick in before too long.

Part of the reason I think for my nap is that we have a darn squirrel that decides right outside our bedroom window's the place to be.  We have an AC unit under our window that keeps our home relatively cool, but the way it's hooked up to the wall outside makes a prime place for a squirrel to make a lot of noise.  He gets right under it and scratches or something on the metal supports, which carries the sound throughout the entire unit and wakes us up at 7 in the morning (I know you probably get up then or earlier, but our first obligations are at 10:30, so you can see how this could bother us).  Every morning for the past week has been interrupted by our new neighbor!  I've started trying to scare it with loud noises and spray it with a water bottle.  I even bought a fake rat (half off after Halloween!) to put in the squirrel's favorite place to try to deter it, but to no avail.  The pesty creature must have figured out the rat's not alive or a threat because we still woke up to scratching sounds this morning.  Michael wants it dead--like, he wants to set a trap for it or put out poison for it to eat.  I don't want to kill it because I kind of like having squirrels and birds and other animals hanging around our apartment complex, but this is just bothersome.  We're considering calling up management to see if they can do anything about it.

Our "balcony" on our second-story apartment.  (note my use of a door stopper after searching all over for something wedge-like)

 The squirrel likes to, I think, break acorns on the supports, causing that awful scratching sound.

 And I often find him dashing into our little water heater closet outside.  Is he stockpiling acorns in this warm spot for "winter?"

The fake rat we bought!  I thought it would surely work, that he would be too afraid to encroach on this scary guy's territory, but I guess squirrels are smarter than we thought (but they STILL run the wrong way in traffic).

Another reason for my inability to sleep has to do with the fact that I got out of bed at 7:30 this morning to go hang out at Dr. Shea's Office.  "Why?" you might say, "Didn't you get fired?"  Well...yes.  I got let go because my school schedule just wasn't conducive to dental assisting, and it's too weird to be a part-time assistant.  BUT, I feel I'm still part of the practice!  They've invited me to still come and hang out when I want, this week especially because this Saturday is the LSU/Alabama game!  "What does a dentist's office have to do with football?" you might ask.  Well...Dr. Shea, while he went to the LSU dental school, got his undergrad from, you guessed it, Bama!!!!  The week these two school play, his dental office becomes a sea of Dr. Shea's crimson and white and every one else's purple and gold.  I went over there this morning for a couple hours to partake in the festivities, of course dressed in true Tiger Spirit.  I like that, even though I don't work there anymore, everything left off on a good note.  I enjoy those guys.

Me showing off my tiger hat and festive, heeled, Chuck-like Steve Madden boots.

There's an elephant in the room...literally.

In other news, my Halloween night was spent studying for Psychology...so we didn't do anything FUN or EXCITING for Halloween.  But I did dress up for class!  I figured, "It's Halloween, I'm sure a bunch of people are going to be dressed up today."  I also had items lying around my house to dress up like a girly Homestar Runner, so I also figured "Hey, I'll dress up like Homestar, and since people are my around age here tons of people will know who I am and tell me 'Hey, cool costume!'"  Both of these assumptions turned out to be FALSE.    I got comments like "Wow, what are you dressed up as?" and stares.  Even the girl in my Chinese class who I thought was WAY nerdier than me didn't recognize my guise.  I only saw three other people dressed up on campus, one being a ketchup bottle and the other two being Mario & Luigi.  Looks like I'm pretty dorky for dressing up like an online cartoon character that's little known in Baton Rouge.  But oh well!  At least I was extremely adorable!  I'm proud of my make shift costume, no matter what people say (or don't say, in this case because of the lack of comments...).

Homestaw Wunno!

Maybe I'll try to get some sleep now...we'll see how that works.

**update: I got to sleep, woke up at 7:10 to tell the squirrel to take a hike, then went back to sleep & got up at 10:40.  I feel pretty well rested!