Do you have any unusual routines that you use to get yourself to wind down at bed time? Some people read, but I'm the kind that reads to the end of the page, the chapter, oh Come On! I can't put the book down NOW! So it isn't really all that helpful. I can't tell you how many nights I have stayed up reading, knowing that I would have to pay dearly for it. But when my children were young, I used to make up fairy stories to tell them at bedtime. And I would find myself nodding off too. Who knows what impact staying up the night before reading all night had on that process, but it did seem to work.
Lately I have been watching the surveillance cameras in a nearby tourist town on YouTube and making up stories about what I see. The town is a family orientated vacation spot, so the nightlife is pretty tame. Even the brewhouse seems to close at midnight. But one night I was watching and I spotted four men run out of it in single-file, one right after the other. Then suddenly a large crowd emerged from the nearby buildings and watched them run off up the street. There did not appear to be any police to stop them and after a while, the crowd just wandered back to wherever they came from. So that night I told myself a bed-time story about the men having been caught trying to steal from one of the travelers who was staying the night in the inn above the brewhouse. I never write the stories down, because that would break the bedtime story feel of it and keep my mind from winding down.
Last night I was indulging in my routine, watching the tourist town on YouTube. I was about to turn the TV off and go to bed, when I spotted a man wheel a large dolly filled with boxes up to a door of one of the buildings I could see very well on my screen. What happened next floored me, and left me feeling quite disturbed. Beside the door stood an ornamental shrub that looked to be about four feet high. He tipped it slightly and rummaged around underneath it. Then he used the key he's all too obviously found there to let himself in through a different door. I can only hope they have a key lock box under that shrub, and not just a key lying out for anyone to find. But no, it was all too obvious that there is a key lying out under the shrub by the door....And a camera that broadcast live on YouTube exactly where it is and which door it works on.
Remember, the expectation is that if you are in public, you are being recorded.
Big Brother is watching.
Your self-told bedtime stories routine is priceless! And yeah, talk about a security breach, lol!
ReplyDeleteI love the idea that you are telling yourself bed-time stories. Putting a key under a shrub by the door? They were begging to be robbed weren't they?
ReplyDeleteI used to make up stories at bedtime too. I would start the story and hand it over to one of my sons. The next night it went to the other son and then back to me. Sometimes the stories were short and sometimes they lasted a while. Always verbal and funny.
ReplyDeleteWow. Cameras all over. We don't have much of anything like that in our rural area. We do have Trail Cams though!