better than sleep

Some things are better than sleep. Not many, mind you. I love sleep. Sleep is not love (food is), sleep is home. In fact, I think my love of sleep is what kept me off of powdered drugs in my youth. Sleep probably saved my life.

As I rose to my fifth day of interrupted slumber, I was reluctantly optimistic about the condition of my patient. To my delight and surprise, Marciel was not only alive, he was almost chipper - bitey, even, after breakfast, as a fur seal should be.

And I saw our resident Fish & Game guy before he left to count otters from an airplane. (How cool is his job? It's not always glamorous, usually he's out collecting otter corpses - we call them otter pops once they've been frozen - but he's got a ton of cool gear suggesting he has many grand adventures...) Anyway, I always get excited when I see Mike. I have come to accept the fact that I have a crush on him (my husband noticed it first, refusing to be formerly introduced, suggesting I keep my fantasy life and my real life separate...) and I now embrace it. When I see his truck I cringe and wish I had taken the time to comb my hair. I always wish I had something more clever to say and I torture myself with the memory of the time I summoned him to my beach on Beach Clean Up day. What I had called in as an otter carcass turned out to be a harbor seal. Duh. Anyway, I am assuredly not alone in my admiration for Mike. When I refer to him as "my boyfriend" I get crooked looks from my equally smitten seal friends. It's okay. We have an open relationship.

Anyhow, Mike asked about the suspiciously small hole in my recently dead otter and, though we both must wait for necropsy results, he assured me it could have been made by a single shark tooth. The handful of otters I've seen who've been sampled by sharks (something that is happening a bunch this year) have been relatively torn up. But Mike's seen a lot more dead otters (all of them, in fact) and he explained that some taste tests are just gentler than others. He also pointed out that the day my otter stranded featured the worst weather we've had for weeks (which was a mild rain in the morning and a marine layer all day), suggesting fishermen were less likely to be out and about otter poaching. My boyfriend is such a smart guy.

So while I'd still take human stupidity over parasites or neurotoxins, I'm even happier to accept the food chain as a reason for my otter's demise. Granted, sharks should not be trying to eat otters (which they recognize themselves, leaving the otters alone after the exploratory bite) so it's still depressing (for struggling otters and hungry sharks), but at least sharks are supposed to kill things that live in the ocean.

So all is right in the world. And it's not even noon.