It's just one of those irritating mornings. They happen. You know, the kind that follow a restless night. Everyone has them. That restless night? Well, for one thing it was inordinately hot, humid and misery-making, despite the fans pointed directly at us. They did their best.

And then, there was something else, a sense of disquiet, a disequilibrium of some kind, who knows why? But it seemed somehow, to have affected us both.

We murmured questions to one another during the night, conscious of those times when we were both awake, albeit hardly alert, trying to will ourselves back to sleep. It's comforting, to say the least, to be next to one another, to reach out and stroke an arm, a shoulder, to be reassured of each other's close presence.

And as dawn lit up our bedroom - later now, not the 4:30 a.m. of just a few weeks earlier when the robins and cardinals began their trilling welcome to a new day - we would awake, again, fall back to sleep, then up again. Finally, going downstairs to prepare for breakfast, taking our little dogs out to the backyard before ourselves showering.

And hearing the garbage trucks roaming up and down the street. Where they're not supposed to be. After all, trash collection is always put forward a day after a national holiday and we'd just had one, the previous week-end. But no, it was done otherwise this time around, despite that we'd checked to make certain, with the printed schedule.

And wouldn't you know it, this was the time we had bags of compostable material too large for our own two composters, to be collected by the municipality for their own. And bags containing what had been swept up and discarded in cleaning the sheds and the garage. Sigh. Big hurry to get all that out to the curb. Too late for the bi-weekly paper pick-up though, that was already picked up.

Sigh again.