Snow day!
I've long hated February 13. When I was 8, it fell on a Monday -- which, as everyone knows, is far scarier than Friday the 13th -- and my guinea pig Izod died. The
day before Valentine's Day. Ever after, I've viewed this date as nothing good.
Today started out much like that. I woke up bright and early, ready to go run some fun-filled errands before work, but it turned out that there was no hot water. I woke up my ever-handy husband and we studied the manual, but to no avail. So I called the furnace company and prepared for a day of pure suckitude.
From a financial standpoint, nothing good happened today. But overall, I can't complain. Nothing much was going on at work, for once. The furnace guys showed up well before they said they would. They fixed the problem, at least for the moment. (It involved a cookie sheet and a lot of carbon monoxide.) And by the time they left, it was almost noon and it was snowing so hard I blissfully sent out an email -- "Whereabouts: Working from home today."
My office closed at 3:30 because of the weather. This has never happened before, and really it didn't quite happen today, seeing as how all of my coworkers were still there 2 hours later. But I quit work at 6 and read a book until 7:15, when I walked out into the "blizzard" to see my friend Gordon play.
(As I told him, "Cue: 'When I lived in New England . . . '" Because the "blizzard" is only 6, maybe 8 inches tops. I don't think Chicago gets a lot of snow, but the furnace guys begged to disagree. It
used to get a lot of snow here, they said ominously. All I know is, it was maybe 15 degrees and the snow was so fine and so fast that the back of my throat was scraped raw and my cheeks were red for an hour. And that's pretty cold, fossil fuels or no.)
But I stayed home from work, and it was half-price wine night, and my sis and her friend and Queen of the Maye came out, and who's to argue with that?
So for once, a 2/13 turned out OK.
We'll see how 2/14 turns out, post-half-price wine night.
