Wanna start a panic?

Here’s what it takes, at least for me: Turn off my internet connection. Even for just a second. I’ll get antsy. Then, if you want to make it really worse, let two of our three computers reconnect, but keep the one I’m on in some kind of Airport limbo in which it can’t even find the network, let alone join it. So, that was the last forty minutes of my life. Now I’m anxiously watching the little Airport symbol in the toolbar, just like I used to stare at the battery charge level in my Fuego, because at any moment it could slip back into the negative and the next thing you know I’m on my back with another rebuilt alternator in my hands, trying to stuff it up into that little tiny space. I owned a belt-tensioner, that’s how bad things were.

Phenomenally lazy weekend, abetted by extreme, nasty, bone-chilling cold and winds, plus a little bit of snow and ice. Picking through old things, finding more old family photos that need scanning and sharing, all that sort of thing. Must be what put me a bit on the edge, emotionally, because this afternoon I harangued Hannah into joining me for a little trip to the State Museum — my kids have pretty much grown up there, so it’s not exactly a special event — and as we walked through the World Trade Center exhibit, it all became way too much for me. She, for once, was curious and interested in the whole thing — she normally doesn’t want to talk about it — and so I had to answer her questions with what I know, which is a bit more than I want to know. One of the crushed fire trucks is there, and that was more than I could take, so it was either get out of there or surrender to weeping. We got out. Finished up with a carousel ride and sandwiches up on the terrace. They’ve moved the old salt column up there among the neat little exhibits that inhabit that space, with a sign that says that that museum visitors used to be allowed to lick the salt. In fact, it seems to me more like visitors were required to lick the salt, which resulted in a number of tongue grooves and memories that are now, in an age of germphobia, very, very disturbing indeed.