It's 1:43am and I can't

It's 1:43am and I can't sleep. My heart's pumping blood around my body - which is a good thing - except I can hear it. I can feel the very shape of my eyeballs in their sockets. My stomach is gurgling with emptiness as breakfast gets closer. My jaw aches from clenching my teeth. And the sure sign I can't sleep is that I am dredging up memories of Paul Mills and beating myself up for not walking out the night of our very first date. When my brain won't shut up, it's like some caffenated mad cleaner has decided to alphabetise and reorder all the files in cabinets M-Z in my brain. Which again, wouldn't be so bad if she didn't insist on reading each and every one of the files out loud, forcing me to listen and emphasising important points I'd missed at the time. Like the time she read and re-read the file about the guy in the book shop who talked to me for ages about what books I liked until I realised, two years later in the middle of the night, that he was actually trying to pick me up - I mean come on, Michelle, guys aren't *that* interested in Anne McCaffrey. It's been a while since I've had insomnia - I guess I forgot what it was all about. This is Night Four. Anyway, anyway - hot milk, and honey - that'll stop the tummy rumbling *and* make me carbohydrate-sleepy. My cellphone has been flat for two days. I finally charged it this evening and low and behold, three txt messages, all from James. Now I know he's all infared and a keyboard txt'r but his messages sure did cheer me up, a LOT. Not because they were funny - and lets face it, mostly he is funny - but because one of them said the very right thing at the very right time. My bed is all falling apart from tossing and turning in it. I remember when I was a little girl and getting sick with the horrible things little girls get sick with - like the mumps and stuff - and feeling sick and hot and having bad dreams and tangled sheets, and mum getting me up to have a bath and get me into clean pyjamas and coming back to my bed to continue being sick to find it remade with cool clean sheets and folded back blankets and I don't think, apart from the illness part of the scenario, that there is a better feeling in the world than sinking into that cool white bliss of mother tucked sheets. If you owned a company that dug ditches, and you had a team of ditch-diggers who worked for you - would you call them ungrateful if they still complained about their working conditions after you bought them new shovels for Christmas? Milk's all gone - will go and straighten my bed and have another go at this sleeping thing.
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Abe's Bagels Cafe on

The Cafe formally known as Abe's Bagels Abe's Bagels Cafe on Swanson Street is now called Swanson Cafe. It appears they still serve Abe's Bagels, but it's not listed on the official Abe's Bagels website. My uninformed guess is that the Abe's Bagels people have separated the cafe business from the bagels business, which would a)protect them from the cafe being too quiet, and b)allow the cafe to sell more cafe style food than just bagels. We (me, Mish, James) went there practically every day for months, addicted. I'd get a tomato basil bagel with cream cheese, James'd get a cinnamon-raisin bagel with wildberry creamcheese (blech) and Mish would have her lemon honey. And we'd all have large flat whites, and we'd be forking over $7.50 a pop. I can't remember when the drift started, but I suspect it was when James left work. Then the "bagel guy" we knew and loved was replaced, and all the comforting familiarity of the place was gone... replacing the laconic, relaxed-but-efficient style of the old staff with an enthusiastic "HI ROSE!" ,an inability to work the cash-register, and the world's most ancient macintosh for a web terminal. PS: Since I've used the phrase "Abe's Bagels" so many times that google will think I'm important: a message for Abe's bagels people. Please, please buy the domain abesbagels.co.nz for yourself. Heck, abesbagels.com was available too, last time I checked. Having bagels.co.nz is really cool, but having your company name would also be good.
Car with [Shhh] number plate
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