Last night was a veritable Murphy’s Law of sleep: everything that could wake us up, did wake us up. First, I stayed up late working through the mound of paperwork that had collected on my desk. Having tamed it, I went to bed. But sleep didn’t come right away. I was wide awake, having eaten a big piece of chocolate earlier in the day.
I closed my eyes and searched for sleep. A few minutes later, Travis woke up sobbing. He wasn’t falling back asleep, so Kelly went in with him.
A minute after that, we heard a horn outside. A train was a mile down the track, alternately inching up the track and idling. It sounded like it was looking at (or for) something. I tuned it out and tried to settle down again.
A car full of teenage girls drove by the front of the house, singing something at the top of their lungs. Great.
As their noise fades away, the train throttles up and finally glides past our house. It breaks tradition of other night trains by leaning heavily on its horn as it approaches Durant. In fact, it blows its horn near-continuously for almost a minute. Dammit!
Kelly leaves Travis, having been unsuccessful in settling him. He wails as we look at each other, deciding what to do. The train, having successfully woken up everyone on our side of Durant, decides to back up and wake up everyone on the other side. It chugs back down the track to its original spot.
So, Kelly and I are wide awake. Travis is wailing, and a train is taunting us just outside. Niiiiiice.
I take a turn comforting Travis. While I missed seeing him before his bedtime, 12:30 in the morning was not a good time for a visit. He didn’t seem to mind, though. Every time I tried to lean him back into my arms to rock him to sleep, he would use his steel-like abdominal muscles to pop back up and stare wide-eyed around the room.
After ten minutes of fruitless backscratching, pacing around, and rocking, I finally put Travis down in his bed and handed him a stuffed animal as I stepped out of the room. When he stopped wailing five minutes later, Kelly and I thought we were home free.
Just as we were beginning to breathe again, along comes Thomas the Tank Engine, making a third low-speed pass up the track. WTF? I suppose after midnight was a good time to break in a new engineer or something. At least this time, they barely touched the horn.
Having heard this all before, I waited and bit and – sure enough – the train came sneaking back down the track, this time with no horn at all. Practicing his stealth moves, perhaps?
The funny thing is that earlier in the day, I had really wanted to see a train pass by. On the way to the TriLUG meeting, I saw crossing gates down as I drove down Atlantic Avenue. I stopped at the old Seaboard train station downtown and waited, hoping the train would pass mere feet from me as I stood at the old passenger platform (trains move very slowly there, so its not as dangerous as it may sound). After ten minutes, I realized the train I thought I was tracking had been heading north. D’oh.
