Crash! Boom! Zzzzzzz.

When I was small, my family talked about how I could sleep through Armageddon. I assumed things had changed a bit as I got older -- if I wake up to the going-out-request whimper of one small poodle, surely I'm not that sound a sleeper, right?

It turns out that this is a specialized un-soundness, because last night, the storm cut a tall birch poplar (later inspection shows that the birch branches on the deck are from another tree) tree in half and sent the south half crashing down into our backyard, right outside my bedroom window, and I slept through it. Didn't notice a thing until I glanced out the kitchen windows while making my breakfast this morning and thought, "Huh. The trees we used to have here grew up, not sideways. Damn vertigo." But for once the vertigo was not to blame.

It could have fallen on the roof, and it didn't. It could have severely damaged the fence, and it didn't. As far as tree damage this size goes, we're extremely lucky.

I'm still wondering what else I could sleep through, though.

In unrelated news: the YA author's name is Scott Westerfeld, people. Westerfeld. Not Westerfield. I have several of his books right here, and unless his publisher has misspelled his name on all of them: Westerfeld. No i. I am not a close personal friend of Scott Westerfeld's -- in fact, I've never so much as exchanged e-mail with him -- but having been Marisa Lindgren about a hundred times too many in my childhood, I am sensitive to this sort of thing, and I saw it misspelled three times by different people on my friendslist in the last 24 hours. All of them praising him, which almost makes it worse to Marsha Liger here. Think of him as Oedipus if you must; there are no i's. Westerfeld. Okay? Okay.