[wednesday 9/17/14] in 2013-2014

Today is a beautifully eerie day.

We had a spontaneous sleepover last night on behalf of persistent lightning, which I can’t sleep through. The new strategy is to literally hide behind Aaron so that the light isn’t flashing in my eyes and waking me up. Morning was still heavily overcast with a quickly lifting fog. I drove to work watching the vapors whirl around and evaporate. For the first time, the sky was clear enough to see the tower tops of the Ravenel bridge peeking through the fog bank. Some of the steeples and hotels were just barely visible above the ground fog when I got to the third floor office. Everything is still wet and puddling after yesterday’s downpours, so the world is gray above and below. Storms have been drifting overhead all day in dark blue-gray shelf clouds before going out to sea. My back still hurts, so I took half a muscle relaxer this morning at work, and have been fighting off bored sleepies ever since. (But I can easily reach the filing cabinets now.)

My manager was almost hit by a van frantically pulling into a nearby parking lot as he walked back from an errand. We watched from the conference room windows as two police postal inspectors (?) arrested a guy and put him in the back of a champagne gold undercover minivan. Just after that, two men (landscapers?) dug around in the potted palm trees in our alley walkway.

The rain had slacked off, and I was rapidly running out of drinks/caffeine, so I went for a walk. Nothing odd in the parking lot. No signs of landscapers or postal service law enforcement. I walked through gray sprinkles to the gas station on the corner. Another shelf cloud rolled in behind me and the air went hot, wet, and still. A trolley turned the corner and the computerized female voice said Caution! just as a rain-cooled breeze came out of the clouds.

It was still sprinkling for the walk back. I cut across a park, walking diagonal across the green and eyeballing the storm clouds, hedging my bets against lightning. It hasn’t rained since; the clouds gather and pile, then get pushed northeast again to hit some islands and the harbor. They’re still neat to watch. I’ve heard a distant building’s fire alarm go off, because my shrieking crepe myrtle has been too smothered under that still air to scratch against the window.

It’s a neat day.