YAY, IT'S MORNING AGAIN!

A few of you have noticed that I haven't been posting at my usual 5 or 6 a.m.

I've always been an early riser (read: from 4 a.m. on....) and I love it, and I've always been 'good to go' on six hours sleep. So I'm generally asleep no later than 10 pm., and up for the day between 4 and 5 a.m.

But I have this weird 'cyclical' sleep disorder that works like this when it's happening ... I *go* to sleep easily and quickly, and always have. However, I sometimes wake up anytime after 2:00 a.m. -- and then can't get back to sleep. I've spent years 'fighting' it ... doing 'relaxation therapy', playing tapes, trying a few different meditations, drinking certain kinds of tea, blah, blah, blah... and it really hasn't made any difference.

So I get up. It's lovely, actually ... the city is quiet at that time (not that it's that noisy here anyway), sometimes I'll start a little fire, and I'll wrap a shawl around my shoulders, and knit, of course. An hour or two, maybe three, will go by ... and then, from one minute to the next, I'm cold, and exhausted, and I go back to bed.

Depending on the time I've gone back to bed, I'll set the alarm for a more 'reasonable' hour. Then the alarm goes off, and I either sleep through it, or I wake up, VERY grumpy!

That's what's been happening for the last few days, unfortunately, and since our daytime lives are busy, I haven't been able to blog until later in the day.

But I went to sleep last night at around 10:15 ... and woke up at 4:15 this morning. Back on track!

But I gotta tell ya ... if I think I have it tough (which I don't), I want to tell you about someone who really *does.* I introduced you to Raven in June, when she turned up at World Wide Knit in Public Day and was drop-spindle spinning almost the whole day (scroll down to see her).

Well, Raven was diagnosed, not long after that day, with Lyme Disease. That's bad enough ... but she'd had it, undiagnosed, for 20 years.

That makes the treatment completely different, long-term, controversial and EXPENSIVE. To top it off, she has to go to Seattle to get it. You can read all about Raven's journey this last year here, and her fibre-related blog is here. Raven was a University of Victoria student when her world caved in, and she has very little money.

I can't imagine what living with Lyme would be like, and was feeling pretty helpless about the whole thing ... until some of Raven's friends launched a fund-raising blog for her.

I just wanted to share Raven's story, and if you feel you can donate a little to help her cover her expenses, that would be a bonus.