Let's Hunker!

If I get a newspaper tomorrow morning, I will consider it a miracle. You know it is bad when you get an email from the Washington Post saying that the paper carriers might not be able to deliver the paper. It is especially a bad sign when you get your Sunday inserts tucked in with Friday's paper, instead of Saturday's.

Every December, my paper carrier sends a Christmas card with a tip envelope to sent him. If I have a newspaper tomorrow, he will be getting a tip this year. He didn't miss on the 19th or 20th of December, when we had the last blizzard. All this adds up to my respect, and I will be mailing him a little something.

I didn't sleep that well last night, wondering how things would be today. I got up and did my usual thing for a work morning, and went into work at 9:30. It was surprisingly quiet on the phones. At about one in the afternoon, the assistant manager asked us if we were working tomorrow, and she told us that we had tomorrow off, with pay.

I came back from lunch at three to find that we were all being dismissed at four o'clock, with pay until six.

They are a lot nicer about this than they used to be. They have never made a closing announcement the day before like this. And prior to this year, you had to use vacation or personal days if we closed. Makes me wonder what circumstances made them do this.

So at four, I came home to find that the parking space I had staked as my own had been taken; I had marked it with a trash can, and some moron decided to move the trash can out of the way and park his car there. So I found the last open (and unclaimed) space in the lot, and parked there.

Julie and I ate dinner together, and then we watched "The Princess Bride" on DVD. I had never seen this movie before (and wasn't particularly interested), but she waded through "Humpday" the other night, so I felt the need to oblige. The movie was cute, but I wouldn't make a habit of seeing it.

I am not setting an alarm clock tomorrow. I will get up when I get up; I have nowhere to go, so why bother? If the newspaper is there, I might or might not walk to Burger King. It seems kind of pointless to walk up there if they don't open. I might just walk to 7-Eleven, get a Big Gulp, and come home to read the paper.

Is it necessary to say that I am now really done with winter? I usually report this either at the end of January or early February; I'm a little late this year. But with two blizzards and a couple of minor snowstorms under our belts, I am ready for spring.

I am now doing some laundry, so that if I am stuck here on Sunday, I have jeans to wear then as well. I don't want to waste work clothes when I am not going in. So let's have a snow day tomorrow, and enjoy the day off.

Eric Out.