(06) odd-hour driving

I'm pet-sitting for one of my parents' friends, because I'm all Responsible and stuff, and also because I've given cats shots before and this cat requires insulin injections twice daily (and maaan, you can tell this woman is not used to leaving her beloved nest for any length of time, because in addition to giving me detailed instructions on injecting the cat -- totally understandable -- she also showed me things such as how to open her venetian blinds, and how to empty the litterbox). Anyway, D keeps earlier hours than I do, and she was worried enough about the injection schedule to ask me to keep to her hours, so for the past few days I've been dragging my butt out of bed at about five a.m. to first deal (briefly) with my pets and then drive across town to deal with hers.

And I'd mind this a lot more if I didn't love the feel of a city's streets either very late at night or very early in the morning, when very few people are around, when you go whole minutes on the drive without seeing another living thing, or any movement at all, through town with light provided by 24-hour businesses and orangey sodium lights, and then onto the country roads, under canopies of trees, only the headlights to light the way.

Now that I have an office job, I'm keeping much more regular hours, and I go to bed at a reasonable hour and do my best to, you know, sleep all night. As a result, I'm mostly out when everyone else is, and I do miss this part of keeping retail hours, of being a sometime insomniac, in a low-grade wouldn't-trade-it way that I didn't even notice until I had it again for a few days.