The moon and bloggers were not aligned last night

It may have been the moon, it may have been the demands of the workplace, but all last night I was buoyed by emails from blogger friends who, like me, could not, would not sleep. Check out my Inbox. Four bloggers, helping each other through the night.

every hour a "you got mail" 

Why do I think that the night was especially difficult only for bloggers? Because I know for a fact that film stars, for example, had no trouble snoozing. NBC woke Hillary Swank from her heavy slumber minutes after the 7:30 am announcement of her Oscar nomination for Best Actress. I think she was on the East Coast (i.e. 8:30 a.m.) yet she herself admitted that her voice sounded groggy and hoarse from having just woken up. Laura Linney (Supporting Actress Nomination) sounded even worse, but at least she was summoned to the phone further to the west and so for her, it was pre-alarm-clock early.

Still, they were sleeping, we were not. A bloggers’ cursed night? A wicked lunar revenge against our lot? I’ll never know.

If a friend offered you a gift (worth up to, but not more than $50,000), what would you ask for?

Here are things running through my head as I work my way through the night:

1. Lots of airline tickets (in this way I would beef up my frequent flyer miles, because surely $50,000 worth of airline tickets would buy me life-long gold status in Frequence Plus or World Perks or something.)
2. …in the same vein, I could, I suppose, finally decide which coffee house I would commit to and buy 15,000 latés (tipping generously), punching one of those coffee cards each time so I’d get another 1,500 free ones.
3. A crumbling stone hut in Umbria, with the idea that it would grow in value, or if not, I could at least have some shelter on the day I do my “great escape” away from it all. It would have to be within walking distance to an Internet café.
4. ?? (Night is still young, room for more ideas, though one gets kind of nutty as the hours move along toward dawn…)