I had a presentation to do today, so I didn't sleep last night. It's been years and years since I've regularly had trouble sleeping, and to be honest, I don't remember what I used to do to amuse myself. This morning when I woke up and remembered the several hours of time-passing that I did in my head, I laughed out loud. First, I spent about twenty solid minutes, then some more minutes dispersed throughout the night, thanking some higher power. It was very much a sheep-counting method. I thought perhaps if I did something repetitive in my head for a while, I would just sort of drift off to sleep.... But since when does counting sheep actually work, anyway? So for a good portion of my night, this is what my head sounded like: "Thank you for grass. Thank you for Aoife. Thank you for Bijou. Thank you for dancing. Thank you for the smell of wood. Thank you for cars. Thank you for food. Thank you for water. Thank you for lattes. Thank you for basil. Thank you for Ingrid Michaelson. Thank you for Hanson. Thank you for breadsticks. Thank you for Patrick Swayze. Thank you for golden hair. Thank you for contra dancing. Thank you for picnics. Thank you for showers. Thank you for bare feet. Thank you for high heels. Thank you for dresses. Thank you for silk. Thank you for puppies. Thank you for goats. Thank you for dirt. Thank you for paper. Thank you for pens. Thank you for the U.S. postal service. Thank you for Denzel Ringthigh. Thank you for Dr. Seuss. Thank you for Harry Potter. Thank you for J.R.R. Tolkein. Thank you for Orlando Bloom. Thank you for bread. Thank you for zeppole. Thank you for eclairs. Thank you for jelly donuts. Thank you for Hoy. Thank you for mathematics. Thank you for MP3 players. Thank you for oranges. Thank you for watermelon. Thank you for paint. Thank you for Savannah. Thank you for the ocean. Thank you for ice skates. Thank you for Harrison Ford. Thank you for Star Wars. Thank you for Jack Twist. Thank you for Ennis Del Mar. Thank you for Downton Abbey. Thank you for Emma Thompson. Thank you for Leonardo DiCaprio. Thank you for Sherlock Holmes. Thank you for blogs...." Etc, etc, .... etc....... And so it went for some time. Until I got bored, or went off on a tangent or something. I got to thinking about France, and about French, and about the people I know who put "French" as a language on their facebook pages. Then I got thinking about the people who don't know a second language, and so put things like "Ubbi Dubbi" and "Pig-Latin". Then I remembered that I used to spend a good deal of my time being insulted by new-found cousins in pig Latin. Then I realized that I had no memory of how pig Latin worked. So then I sat for a while trying to remember. When I finally remembered, I thought that since I was trying to sleep, and sheep are associated with trying to sleep, and I was thinking about pigs, and sheep and pigs are both barnyard animals, that maybe I should make a trying-to-sleep variation on pig Latin called "Sheep Latin". It didn't take long to invent Sheep Latin - I decided that instead of adding an "ay" to the ends of words, you add an "ah". I then spoke about one sentence to myself in sheep Latin, when I got bored and probably went back to copious amounts of thanking. After that, the other sorts of things that swim in your head incoherently before sleep took over. And here I am - the next night - curbing my insomnia with blogging about my insomnia. Sleep well, readers. And don't try sheep Latin. It doesn't actually help.