A Week in Fragments

This morning, I slept until 5:20 a.m., which is really late for me.  I don't know that I have an essay of a  blog post.  Let me collect some thoughts from the past week:

--The big work news of this week:  my boss was let go yesterday.  I don't have much more information than that, so I don't know if the decision was about money, about performance, about changes in vision, or about something more negative.  He was told at 10:00 a.m. and spent the next 2 hours packing up his office and taking everything to the car. 

--When I think back about this week, will I remember that event or Hurricane Laura more?  What a historic hurricane.  I do see it as a harbinger of hurricanes to come.  This week, I wrote this Facebook post:  "Year after year, we talk about abnormally warm ocean waters as hurricane season ramps up in August. I think it's time to just admit that past ocean temps are the abnormal. Sigh."

--Our conversations turned, as they often do when a monster storm comes ashore, to the fact that we really can't afford to stay here. I mean that sentence in all sorts of ways. Those of us who live on coastlines are living on borrowed time; everyone I know in South Florida knows that fact. What to do about it? Most everyone I know is still sorting that out, and the economic collapse caused by the corona virus makes our choices more limited. Sure, we could sell our houses in this hot housing market, but can we find jobs in other locations? Or can we find rental properties here that will work?

--I am getting well trained in holding conflicting truths in my head. I am tired of this training.

--I have done a lot of reading this month. Once August leaves, and I'm done with the Sealey Challenge, I'll write a blog post about reading 1 volume of poetry each day.

--We had 2 days of no air conditioning in my office suite this week. I wrote this Facebook post on Wednesday when I got to the office to discover it had been fixed: "On this day when a monster hurricane is headed to the Texas/Louisiana coast, it seems petty to be as grateful as I am for the AC repair person who has made my office cool again. Two days of working in an office without AC has made me newly appreciative!"

--I also wanted to preserve this Facebook post: "I am walking down a hallway in a building on campus, and I'm holding a no touch thermometer. Because I will always be an English major, the lines of Emily Dickinson float in my head: 'My life had stood - a loaded gun -'"