My bed is criminally comfortable, guys. Especially after having been gone for 10 days, away from its soft, big, plushy confines. It’s all I can do right now to help myself from just slipping into its warm promise of dreamland.

The drive home today was dominated by listening to the audiobook of “Mindhunter” by John Douglas, the famed pioneer of the FBI Behavioral Sciences unit that so much serial killer fiction is based upon. It’s fascinating stuff, I can *totally* see how people get so into True Crime. But, it’s also rather exhausting. Especially driving down a dark highway at night where your imagination can fill the voided landscape rushing by with any flight of fancy. There could be a killer out there at this very moment, in fact. Mostly, though, it’s just the imagining of these brutal crimes that exhausts me. I find myself empathizing much more easily with those who *solve* these crimes and their methods for doing so…but any story is only as good as its villain, and I want mine to be as fleshed out and based in reality as they can possibly be. And that means understanding every intimate detail of what they do, how they do it, and why. It’s intrinsically fascinating stuff, but it’s also very, very dark, graphic, and desperate.

So that, combined with the sleep depravation and the rather long and (thankfully) uneventful drive, I’m pretty much 100% zombie right now. A floating stress zombie, actually. All this stress from my mom’s procedure, the failure to get any real work done, and various situations with the apartment building still weigh upon my shoulders. I’d been hoping that the act of coming home would help release all that, but not at the moment. I still have hope that tomorrow will bring the desired result with some long, hard sleep. I’m definitely one of those peeps who needs their sleep. Some people don’t; I’ve known many of them, and I’m completely jealous. But, I need sleep. Pretty much 8 hours of it on a regular basis. 7 1/2 sometimes. That has not been happening lately 😛

So yeah. The Ho brought Cooper down to garage when I got home and he ran over as fast as he could and literally attacked my face with kisses. It’s the first time I’ve ever come home after a decently long trip to my own dog, and it was pretty cool. I mean, he was waaaay more excited to see me than usual. Dogs really do miss you when you’re gone. He also wouldn’t leave my side for the rest of the night, which was pretty sweet. Then, we worked Liz’s audition stuff for tomorrow, which was actually a nice feeling of normalcy. I missed both of them terribly, being up north.

It is wonderful to be home, in my own bed, with my mom on the mend, my fiancé at my side, and my dog at my feet. It is as it should be.

Good night!

Tonight’s steam-punk dreamy artwork is courtesy of Wallpaperup.