After getting to work yesterday morning only to find it was a half day (starting at noon), I drove back home to relax away the morning. My car spun out in two different places on the final approach to my apartment. On the trip back to work, the traffic lights were configured for "night mode," spelling doom for anyone wanting to turn left onto Crystal Lake Road from Route 12. A stretch of asphalt that is normally covered in thirty seconds required nearly six minutes. Work didn't get done until 1700, an unusually late time for we reactor controlmen. Spinout number three was the epic fifteen-minute battle to free my car from its parking spot; a three-man effort was needed to accomplish that. I got home and wanted some Subway, so I went over to the local Shop Rite. The turn for said supermarket is atop a little hill on Bayonet Street, which had not been sanded. And I was behind a Sequoia that refused to exceed ten miles per hour...so sure enough, I lost traction again on the turn. Once I got into the parking lot, the Subway was closed, so I went to another Subway in New London, a mile away.
This morning, I was chipping ice from around my tires; the slush embedded there had frozen solid overnight. At one point, I tried to use my scraper as a pry tool...and I snapped the head right off. Once I got rolling, I was shocked to discover that the lights on Route 12 hadn't been reset, so the stretch between Gungywamp and Crystal Lake was again harrowing, and put me on the Submersible Death Trap a couple of minutes late. By most objective standards, the calendar day between 0730 Monday and that same time Tuesday was straight awful.
But through it all, I was never really flustered, nor did I get angry. Separation '09 - officially eleven weeks away, effectively only seven - has caused an unusual tranquility to pass over me. I thought of the way the American hockey team might have felt in the last few minutes of the Miracle on Ice. Also tonight, I was reading Bill Simmons's account of the last game of last year's NBA Finals. That tale captures a similar "is this really happening?" feeling. And perhaps the best part: it's only the prelude. What's it going to feel like in this much time, when the final horn sounds, and this pipe dream becomes reality?
