What a day was yesterday. I’m feeling a little emotional over the events in Japan and certainly don’t want to minimize it by applying drama my mundane little day. But I’d rather not attempt to write anything specific about the disaster. Too much, so too much.

So, there were people walking on my roof today. We knew the reroofing was coming, and that we needed to “be prepared for construction noises no earlier than 8am.” We were not prepared for “armageddon-like, house-shaking insanity at 6:15am.” I lay terrified in my bed until a picture above me jarred loose and fell on me.

I was already jumpy from the news in Japan from the night before and my cellphone alerting me to tsunami warnings along my coast. I checked on the Elderly Relative; the roofers hadn’t reached the area above his room, so all was calm on his side of things. I decided to go out and take a run, since I was curious to see what 6:45am looked like.

I ran for a bit along the nearby harbor, about half an hour before the projected tsunami arrival time. Everything was glassy and gorgeous; very hard to imagine impending disaster. I considered going to the beach and rubbernecking at tidal wave arrival time, but

1. I am not really a gawker at heart; and
2. I didn’t want to get swept away and have my friends discuss at my funeral what a careless dumbshit I was.*

Total chaos when I got home. The roofers were blasting their radio on the roof, so in addition to the inconceivably chaotic pounding, we had deafening, Surround-sound Tejano music. The Elderly Relative was completely freaked out and unhinged. After I got him calmed down I got into the shower, only to get out immediately when someone decided to leeeeeeean on the doorbell. The workmen wanted me to open the back door so they could use an outlet. This unhinged the Elderly Relative all over again.

Rinse and repeat. When I was finally ready to leave, I asked the roofers to please turn off the radio before I started getting stabby. I left, praying that Relative could hang on to what wits he has before the caretaker came at 3pm**.

Work, fortunately, ebbed to a sizzle today so I could get in a yoga class and a coffee with a friend, two things that restored my sanity, just a little bit.

I revived enough to attend a production of Amadeus, which may have been the perfect thing to see. It was so, scenery-chewingly, deliciously overwrought, that I felt like it attuned with the frequency of my own emotional chaos, creating a weird harmony. It was a really good production. There was a moment when Salieri, at the end of his tether with his envy at Mozart, takes a page of Mozart’s Requiem and bites a huge chunk out of it and spits it to the floor. I’m going to try this technique of getting my point across. Bitey bitey!

That, my precious reader, was my day. Hopefully the roofers won’t violate the no-weekend-working rule so I can get some precious, placid-water, contented sleep.

* There were some rough seas and some crazy (but non-damaging) surging in the harbors, but California is A-OK.

** And I guess all was well. No news=good news, and the house was intact and Elderly Relative peacefully slumbering when I got home.