Counting Sheep: It Doesn’t Work

Earlier this week I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back asleep. Usually I will just toss and turn and think about random things. But I decided this time I was going to try counting sheep. I visualized cute little sheep (that looked like the swirly design that Green Dirt Farm uses for their logo) running toward a fence and then swiftly hopping over. After three or four sheep I didn’t feel any more relaxed so I thought “maybe I should count backward” but that didn’t work because I started with 99 and that immediately made me start singing “99 bottles of beer on the wall!” in my head and I got all pumped up about having so much beer on the wall. I immediately went back to sheep #1.

So the sheep started having fun and as they jumped the fence they would high-five each other. It was pretty funny seeing them get all excited and jump up, smacking their front hooves together. By then I started thinking about sheep related phrases which led me to visualizing a black sheep jumping over the fence and all the jubilant high-fiving sheep ignored him. I laid there and thought to myself “if I post this on Facebook I wonder if people will understand its a black-sheep-of-the-family reference, not a Paula-Deen-racial-slur-type thing” and my thoughts immediately followed up with the poor black sheep feeling so sad that everyone ignored him when he cleared the fence. So I thought, I’m going to teach those cocky sheep a lesson! And I raised the height of the fence. It was awesome! Sheep were spinning and ricocheting off the fence because they couldn’t jump high enough. Boing! I started to kind of chuckle (inside my head so I wouldn’t wake up Ben) and then one of the sheep turned to me and said “F- Ewe!” and that really got me laughing (again inside my head). F Ewe! Ewe! Sheep! Hilarious! So I stopped thinking about sheep and resorted to making a to-do-list in my head. And then I found $20 in my pocket.*

*Ben always says if you’re telling a story and you’re not sure if people will think its good, you should end with “then I found $20 in my pocket.” Because that is sure to impress.