Och: my sleep is all messed up. Too. Much. Light.

6:11 a. m. as I write this, and the Sun's already up. When I woke at 4:30, the cardinals were singing their dawn songs. (Like roosters, they have special receptors in their brains that register even the slightest increase in light.) CST: Cardinal Standard Time. Whtt whtt whtt: cheerio! Yeah, and the broom you rode in on, too.

When I went to bed at 11 last night, there was still light in the western sky. Where I live, it's about 8 hours from sundown to sunrise at the summer sunstead, but as any Northron can tell you, just because the Sun's below the horizon doesn't mean it's dark. In Shetland they call it the simmer dim: the long, slow twilights of summer's solstice-tide.

Nor am I the only one. Here and now we're all walking around in a collective state of chronic sleep deprivation. Add heat and voilà: the proverbial Midsummer Madness. Small wonder I've heard more sirens and seen more car crashes during the past two weeks than in the previous two months put together.

The day of Midsummer's Eve I came home to a message of mock-panic from a coven-sib:

Steve, the days just keep getting longer and longer and the Sun's getting hotter and hotter, and if it doesn't stop we're all just going to burn up! Meet me up at the Witch's Hat Tower tonight: we've got to do something about this!

I laughed and duly met her up at the Witch's Hat Tower that night along with the rest of the usual crew and the extended clan. And indeed we did do something about it.

Well, it's witch's work to turn the wheel, they say. Still: turning our faces towards Winter at Summer's very beginning.

Now that's Midsummer Madness.