IT'S SUCH AN IMPERFECT DAY

What a miserable day. Not enough sleep last night, and that's just my fault. My balcony door was slightly ajar, letting in more of a draft than usual, and that's my building manager's fault. Then before running out the door I glance at the WeatherPop icon in my menu bar, informing me that it was 12 degrees outside — but felt like -7. I wrapped my scarf around my head an extra time and stormed out into the cold. And it was really cold.

When I got to work, everyone was still wearing their coats, and a few of them, hats. This is because the heat wasn't on, either broken or shut off, we didn't know. And it was too early to call the help desk. Eventually we called and got through, and then … it got colder. And colder still. We drank hot cocoa and spent our day working in hats and coats. I was still cold.

The best part of my day was writing and posting my latest column for DCist, on the Titanic Memorial way down in SW. Read it here.

Just before I posted it, I read — at DCist, of course — that some idiot had jumped in front of a train along the Orange/Blue line at Metro Center ... which of course is precisely in the middle of my route home. Hearing that delays were just 20 minutes, I figured I could get lucky or wait it out while rounding into the homestretch of The Corrections. Apparently I was misinformed. No trains were moving through Metro Center along Orange/Blue. My train went out of service at Farragut West. The loudspeaker told us to exit the station, cross Farragut Square, and get back on at Farragut North. This was better than sitting underground for three hours … but it was really, really cold (even as I write this, my legs ache from the cold).

Tomorrow is "secret Santa" at work, and somehow I got stuck with an intern I barely know (not because I'm a jerk, but because he's never, ever around). At Rite-Aid I was going to buy him a gigantic Hershey bar and a wall-plug carbon monoxide detector. Funny! Well, it was funny at the $8 listed in the aisle — like a kick in the gut at the $40 rung up at the cash register. (I still got the Hershey bar.) So I crossed the street and bought a T-shirt from Ben's Chili Bowl.

With this kind of luck, he won't even be there to accept it. Or if he does, it'll turn out he's lived in DC all his life. Now it's the early evening and I'm trying to figure out what I need to get done before leaving for Portland this week. Writing this post was one of them, and now I've got that part done.

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posted by WWB at 7:12 PM |