Dry run (not exactly).

I nearly had a Mary Poppins moment yesterday. Let me splain, Lucy.

After waking at 3:15am, when the thunder was louder than my CPAP and I was suddenly awake, with no hope of getting back to sleep before bedtime, I knitted and tinked, tinked and knitted until it was time to throw everything into various bags and get ready for work.

And of course I went into theta-mode [flow, or creativity mode, with no sense of the passage of time] while sitting in the tub, which meant I had the mixed blessing of driving myself to work because I dried off too late to make the train. The rain had abated, and the driveway had firmed up considerably. I got myself and my stuff into the car; I was nearly two blocks from the house when the sky opened up again.

Spit, spit, spit. Splat, splat, splat. Pummel, pummel, pummel. I think visibility ran anywhere from 25 feet to 50 yards. It was a long, slow crawl to Dallas, but thankfully most of my fellow commuters were in a civilized frame of mind. I was only three minutes late.

We had enough people out on vacation that I got to park beneath our building and keep my tootsies dry. I was nowhere near as lucky when I did the early mail run. I borrowed a friend’s bumbershoot because it was huge and reinforced. My little $3.50 number would have turned itself inside out in a Noo Yawk minute. By the time I got the meter fed, I was wet to the knees. By the time I was back in the car, my jeans were wet to the hips and my shirt was soaked from the hem to my shoulder blades.

I had worn my cheapie tennis shoes because my feet and ankles were swollen from lack of sleep. I had also worn my new black jeans, the ones that are too big, and folded up the hems. But I had brought a pair of clogs to the office, and I had an old pair of denim leggings and fresh skivvies in a large-ish zippered bag [like a travel makeup bag] that I keep in my desk for Girl Emergencies.

I did not, however, have a dry shirt or another pair of socks. I will remedy that oversight when I take the restocked bag back to the office after my vacation.

The wind was blowing sideways and fiercely when I got out of the car at the Post Office. I could have folded up the hems until they were knee high, and those jeans would still have been soaked through. But I felt a lot better after changing out of [most of] my wet stuff, even if I had to be barefoot inside my clogs.

I stayed awake on the drive home by fantasizing about a bowl of lobster bisque at Lucille’s and some of their good bread. And once I got to Fort Worth, I made that fantasy a reality. Then I came home and hung up the wet stuff and put in August Rush and knitted well past the point where I was supposed to start the sleeve increases.

It is now 10:27 as I write, and I have been up for 19 hours and change. I am going to measure the overenthusiastic sleeve and put in split ring markers where the increases should have gone, and then I am heading off to bed. I might write more in the morning. I am definitely not fixing that sleeve until I’ve gotten whatever sleep may come.

Chapter Two: I woke again around 3:30 but made myself go back to sleep. Should have just gotten up, as I dreamed of plumbing problems [structural, not personal]. I’m out the door in about half an hour.

They’re unplugging my computer and phone at 1:00. I’m hoping to have the rest of my desk packed by then so I can take some PT and just leave. When I get back to the office a week from Monday, all my stuff will be in boxes, and I will be approximately four cubicles to the east of where I now sit. I will miss sitting across a cubicle wall from my best friend at work, and I am not looking forward to sitting just outside the office manager’s office. She is a truly decent human being, and a good boss, and she is a little bitty woman with a great big voice. [I can hear her calling for our IT specialist when I’m at my current location. She’s not a screamer or a yeller; she’s just loud.]

Loud makes me crazy. Seriously. It’s like getting slapped in the face. Or having a four-year-old make the same dratted noise, or say the same dratted word, over and over and over. Heaven only knows what transcribing dictation is going to be like, and one of the attorneys a few doors down from her has an intermittently Technicolor vocabulary.

I’m going to be in the auditory splash zone. I may have to save up for some of those noise-canceling headphones. And I am going to have to move some psychic buttons, because the phrase hostile work environment keeps popping up in my mind...

Must go knit for a minute or two and calm myself down.

If I do get to take off as soon as I’d like, I am thinking UP with Middlest.