A burglar in the night

I haven't slept well at night since I was a kid. The exception being the three years I was in the Army. That's a hard one to figure out because I didn't have a room of my own and slept in a bay with many other soldiers. In Vietnam there were nights on guard duty or when we were under attack that sleep couldn't happen. In fact I'm sure that's a big part of my current sleep problems. But that's for another blog entry. I've had sleep problems throughout my life. I thought that might change when I retired, but it hasn't. The nights remain a time of unease and worry. The other night I again was up for several hours. After I finally returned to bed and had just fallen back to sleep, I heard Katie say, "What was that?" My heart jumped into high speed. I heard something too, scrape, crash, bang! I racked my brain to think of what kind of heavy object I could get my hands on to protect us. We both stayed still and listened. There was definitely someone outside. It sounded like he was on our neighbor's patio. We continued to listen and the crashing and rustling stopped. A new sound emerged. It sounded like crunching. We jumped up and shined a flashlight onto the neighbor's patio. There was a javelina helping itself to something. It sounded like it was eating plastic because of the loud popping and cracking. I have no idea what javelinas eat and assummed they might be like goats and eat anything. "Is it eating their patio furniture?" I whispered. Then Katie remembered that our neighbors had recently gone out to pick pecans. We scanned the area with the light and exposed the thief as he munched away on a box of pecans he had dragged off a shelf. He didn't seem to mind the bright light in his face, he just squinted and went on "pigging out". We knew the pecans were hard earned, so we thought we should do something to make him leave. "Should we throw a rock at him or something?" Katie asked, but the pig-like beast looked too happy to disturb. We went back to bed but couldn't go to sleep with the loud munching going on. Our cat jumped off the bed and went into the kitchen to grab a bite of his kitty food. I guess the crunching made him hungry. So for awhile we had munching in stereo. Well, Katie started laughing and that got me laughing too. Finally she said, "I've got to get a picture of this" and grabbed the camera. I had recently loaned it to our 9 year old grandson and it was in a mode that neither of us recognized, so we turned the light on, found my eyeglasses, looked for the camera instruction book, but this is topic for another time. We succeeded in getting the camera back to a familiar mode and went out again to capture the crime on film (or whatever you call digital pictures). I had the thought, "Now I'd like to get a picture of our neighbor when he discovers his pecans have all been eaten." Finally it got quiet again and I felt totally relaxed. We both drifted off into a deep, peaceful sleep.