Holiday

Fact 1: My office was closed today.

Fact 2: The Dow Jones rose 400 points.

Maybe I should stay home tomorrow, also...?

It was a kooky fluke. At 9:05 this morning I entered the Hancock tower lobby with coffee in hand to find about 500 men and women in dark suits and topcoats, talking on cell phones. (Oh, to have taken a picture of such monochromacity....) Elevator doors stood open and unlit and unmoving. Burly, suited security was everywhere.

It's never fun to see that many people standing outside an office building, as it usually means a fire is in progress. Nonetheless, within a few minutes, our operations manager called me as part of a phone tree: a manhole explosion earlier in the morning, 5 blocks down, cut off electricity to 1,000 nearby buildings. It might come back on at 10:30, it might not. So he told me to go home.

An unexpected day off from work feels ever so much cooler than a Saturday, doesn't it? That unfetteredness of 8 empty hours to be filled or not filled. No one needing anything.

I filled about half of those hours with leftover weekend projects such as changing the cat litter. But first, I drank my coffee, read the Times, and went home and back to bed. Bliss.