Sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 this morning, it suddenly shut off. I'd be more accurate, but unfortunately every other item we possess that was running and plugged into an electrical outlet also switched off simultaneously. My alarm clock made one plaintive BLEEP! before giving up the ghost, the prelude to absolute quiet.
It was like my eyes adjusting to the dark. My ears adjusted to the silence, and I realized that it really wasn't all that quiet. Outside the winds were blowing furiously. I got up and checked out the bedroom window. I could see lights in the development behind us, but the complex itself was black. I wandered over to my computer room and (after tripping over the Grey Menace) checked the window there. Not a light to be seen in any direction. I got my cell phone, set the alarm on it for my usual wake up time, and wandered back to bed.
Of course, I couldn't get back to sleep, worrying about whether or not the cell phone was set correctly, so I gave up after fifteen minutes or so, slopped the hogs, dressed in the dark (good thing I tend to favor blues, greens and blacks - things mix and match nicely in the dark), and left for work. When I left the apartment it was about 6:30.
Apparently I wasn't the only person in the complex to decide that an early trip into work was the way to go. Usually there are only three or four other cars at most that I see when I leave in the morning, but this morning I was waiting behind a dozen cars for my chance to pull into traffic, with still more cars waiting behind me. Dozens of disgruntled drivers, up too early, operating without benefit of caffeine or Pop Tart, waiting far longer than they'd ordinarily have to, unable to merge with traffic on the main road because the lights were out: it was not a pretty sight.
My current musical accompaniment is "Silver Bells".
When is "too early" when it comes to playing Christmas carols? My own humble opinion is that if you're playing them before December 24th, you've jumped the gun. I'm willing to make exceptions for live weekend performances if the artists are age 17 or younger. This assumes that they are locked safely away in some auditorium and not wandering around from door to door, breaking curfew and disturbing my weekly allotment of "Monk" (which is a fantastic, if somewhat erratically scheduled series). I am not willing to make allowances for co-workers.
The Minion has his radio tuned to some idiot station that started playing Christmas carols on Monday. I'm not talking about the occasional carol sandwiched between Britny Spears and Courtney Love. I'm talking 24/7, wall-to-wall, jingle-it-till-you-drop bells. Granted, it is punctuated frequently by commercials. It's gotten to the point where I'm looking forward to the commercials to interrupt the music.
Some over-emoting young thing is singing "The First Noel" at the moment. At this rate I shall surely go crazy by Thanksgiving.
I'm hoping to meet up with Dr. Twenty Cats this Saturday. She's again jobless. Her employer (a corporate chain of veterinary practices) and she did not see eye-to-eye on the best way to practice veterinary medicine. She really needs to get into private practice working for herself, but the expense is just too great to manage to pull that off while still paying off student loans and a mortgage. I strongly suspect that she's going to tell me that she's planning to leave the veterinary medical field altogether and go back to computers.
We're both pretty broke at the moment, so our mall ratting will be of the window-shopping variety. I do plan to stop at the Littman Jewelers at the mall we'll be at, since that was the same place that got me to open a charge account with them. I know they contract the maintenance of their accounts to an outside firm, but I figure the store ought to know how badly their contractor botched up my account.
By way of an aside, I still haven't gotten a letter confirming my account was closed, but I did get a flyer in the mail with coupons for discounts on purchases this weekend. We're talking about the chances a sphere of ice has in Hades here...
*sigh* We've got some big-band version of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer going right now.
The O'Beast goes to the real vet's tonight for his boosters and check up. I really should ask whether or not he should get another echocardiogram, but I simply don't have the cash available for it if they say "yes". I've been monitoring him at home, and his heart murmur seems unchanged (when I can actually hear it through that persistent purr of his).
I'll be curious to see how difficult it will be for me to get to the cat carrier out in our storage area. They're putting siding up on our apartment building, and last I checked the scaffolding they've put up is blocking my access to our storage room. I've never taken a cat on a leash to the vet's before, and O'Beast wouldn't have been my cat of choice to perform this otherwise noble experiment on. Still, there's a fair chance I'll be able to get into the storage room this evening, making this worry a non-issue.
Did Herb Alpert ever do a Christmas album? I'd swear that was the Tijuana Brass playing at the moment.