Sheila Schoonmaker's Maiden Blog

It figures… just when I’m finally making some progress to regaining sleep after enduring eleven days and nights of insomnia, my adrenaline comes back to reverse the progress! The combination of post-menopause and Aspie hypersensitivity doesn’t mix well with a little bit of excitement right after drifting off to sleep. Thank God it’s not too often my little Rascal has to go outside to relieve herself after bedtime! She will not go out of the house after dark unless I’m with her, but the problem is she will sometimes wander around to the dark side of the house without me.

She went around the corner for only a second. Then I heard her give a frightened growl. Instantly I called her back and we both went running into the house (her with her tail between her legs and me ready to pee). If it was an opossum, deer, or neighbor’s cat, she wouldn’t have ran like she did. I know all too well how fast wildlife can snatch dearly beloved pets, so needless to say my legs were shaky over the possibility that my sweet little dog could be gone forever right now. Thank God she isn’t. She sleeps on my couch nearby:

Tired Little Rascal

One snow-covered winter night (around midnight) when walking my German Shepherd during a full moon, I noticed at least a dozen pairs of (coyote) eyes scattered around a field I was approaching. They all stood and stared. Both my dog and I promptly reversed direction and ran as fast as we could. That ended my fun walking down that road so late at night. (None of the roads nearby have street lights and whatever houses are around have their lights off by 11 p.m.).

Would you prefer to deal with coyotes in the daylight or in the dark?

Nasty Coyote

Another night around midnight, when I was taking my German Shepherd for a walk in the rain, I heard a black bear grunting off to my side less than fifteen feet away. My flashlight was useless for visibility in the fog. Immediately I had my dog start barking on command, since I’ve heard bears don’t like large dogs. I don’t know what reaction that bear had to the noise, but I do know he left me alone. That was another rubber-legs night for me.

Black Bear

Bears around here will come inside a house. It doesn’t happen often, but I think one such experience would provide me with enough self-induced epinephrine to keep me awake for a month!

Nights… sometimes it’s necessary to be out in them. The good news is I only got hurt once while out in the dark with one of my pets. Here is a peice from that story within the post of 2.26.8:

“Anyhow, suddenly while I was still outside (I’d been out there already for about 5-10 minutes), I heard a strange scream from a wild animal very close by to where I was standing. Since I couldn’t see much because of how dark it was, I ran as fast as I could to the house (Rascal was ahead of me). Bam . . . down I went into a heap! Is that why they’re called slippers? The ground was full of sharp frozen lumps of dirt and snow and there was nothing to protect my arms and legs from getting cut as I fell and hit the ground hard.”

I thought I was ready to share a story of the night that I experienced which did not have a good ending (it happened many years ago), but now I think I’ll never be able to talk about it without feeling sick.

[Edit added on 5.13.9: Most likely the visitor on the 16th was a black bear. I say that because yesterday morning around 12:30 a.m. my bird feeders were attacked by one. The bear bent the wires of the stronger feeder and smashed the other feeder. Of course that had to happen shortly after buying and installing squirrel baffles!]