Happy half-birthday to me! For very broad definitions of "happy."
As some of you know, the Morning Show's last broadcast will be December 11. Requests are pouring in as people ask to hear special songs one more time. I joined the flood and added my request, which was, of course, Pete Morton's "Water From the Houses of Our Fathers." I've been glued to my radio all week waiting for the song to play, and it finally did yesterday morning. I was in ecstacy.
When I fired up Outlook, I discovered that our shiny happy new CEO had called an "all hands" meeting for 9. We gathered in the conference room, tension so thick you couldn't have hauled it out with a fork lift. At 9:02, Mr. CEO Man walked into the boardroom and said, "This is a difficult day. Today, we're going to have layoffs. I'm not going to answer questions right now, but your managers can answer most questions you have, and we'll meet again later today to go through anything that's left." Meeting adjourned.
At 10:20 I came back from a very tense walk around the building to find my coworker L. packing up. I can't imagine I would've been the most gracious layoffee on the planet, but if you look at the people in our team, she was the one guaranteed to behave most foully. Sure enough, she was swearing and sighing and throwing things and bitching about how she's worked her ass off for this company and why her and blah blah blah. I'm proud to say that I resisted the urge to say, "I bet it has to do with your attitude." She was the only loss from our immediate team, but our boss's boss and his henchman are both out, as is my ex-great-grandboss, the head of Operations. Yikes.
I came home one despondent monkey, but a trip downtown to see Wicked at the Orpheum would surely raise my spirits! I really enjoyed the concept of the show: the sets and costumes were gorgeous, the storyline had a pleasing amount of internal logic, and the ending was acceptably bittersweet. Can't say I was so fond of the music, which was entirely too "composer who peaked in the '70s and now watches too much High School Musical" for my tastes. The real joy, of course, was watching leorathesane twitch. When someone makes a Broadway musical of one of your favorite books, gentle f-list, I encourage you to think long and hard before you go. 'Cause Wicked is good, but it's no, um...Wicked. As a bonus, Frau H. drove us home, because when the house lights came up, leorathesane looked at her clock and said, "Oh. Our bus comes in one minute."
So it was a happy me, albeit one with two lines of a barely familiar song from Wicked stuck in my head, who bopped out to my car this morning. Happy didn't last long. To be precise, it lasted until the moment I noticed that someone had shattered my car's passenger-side vent window (a term I did not know at 7:30 this morning that I know now. Isn't learning fun?) and messed with my stuff (it was not, alas, Robert Goulet). They didn't take anything, because I keep nothing in my car worth taking. Still, I had a broken window and a very sick feeling in my stomach. Thank goodness for all the wonderful people I encountered in the process of fixing said window (sick feeling less easily dispelled): the insurance and auto glass folks had a much-appreciated upbeatness, and my wonderful wife and mother were very caring and sympathetic and patient about my trillion calls and IMs and my apparent inability to think for myself in a crisis.
All this in less than 48 hours. There's a new Pushing Daisies on tonight, and Leora is making fruity curried lentils for dinner. I am committed fully to eating my tasty lentils (with dried cherries and apricots!) and then sitting my butt on the couch and not moving until I know who would possibly want to bury Fred Willard in concrete (other than, you know...everybody). It's a good night to mope.