Tired, part whatever

I've been working 6:00 AM to 2:30 PM Monday through Friday for the past few months. That may end at the beginning of May, but for now, that's the shift I'm on.

For various reasons I need to be out of bed about three hours before the start of my shift. These days that means waking up at 3:00 AM. That's a pretty brutal hour to be awake, but at least ABC still has their tongue-in-cheek overnight news program World News Now to help me get started. Until this weekend, I was generally in bed by 9:00 PM to get a solid - and by solid I mean frequently interrupted - six hours of sleep. But since the "Spring Forward" of Daylight Saving Time began on Sunday morning, I find myself staying up to 10:00 PM - but still waking up at 3:00 AM.

Today I worked overtime for the first time in several weeks. I signed up for two hours, 2:30 PM to 4:30 PM. I clocked out after my last call at 5:15 PM.

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This morning I saw that the food containers on our back porch, left out for the remaining feral cats in the neighborhood, were mostly empty. I topped off the dry food, refilled the water dish, and made a mental note to put out wet food after I did everything else. I then went through the morning routine: started the coffee, fed the cats, ate breakfast, read the funnies., made my lunch. I took the bowls of leftover food from the inside cats, the stuff they didn't eat overnight, and topped it off with the food the outside cats like. I filled two bowls and went to take them outside.

That's when I saw a skunk and an opossum eating side-by-side from the double-sided dry food bowl.

I ran for my camera, but wasn't fast enough. The best photo I could manage shows the opossum exiting the porch while the skunk -wearing some Christmas garland, from a failed effort to keep the birds from stripping all of the cherries from my cherry tree - tries to hide. A few minutes later, I was fairly sure the skunk was gone, so I put the wet food out. 

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Trump fired Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State today. Tillerson learned about his firing through a tweet from Trump that casually mentioned his replacement. A lot of people are surprised and flummoxed by this. But, honestly, if you're still surprised by anything Trump does, you haven't been paying attention.

America, you fucked up. I hope we can survive this.