Paid for a series of yesterdays, with futile and fruitless trips to the newsroom, a store and the post office, and now I’ve got a box I might as well open tomorrow. Also ahead: a shift, and then another day away, and then rinse and repeat next week with time away. Sometimes work covers a few costs.

Company came with skills, carrying uncanny resonances and telling stories about gifts for kids, financial twists of fate, military service and memories of the neighborhood from decades ago. Suddenly, there’s a new vanity, kitchen shelves and a random hallway shelf, with even more space to come.

There might be a handyperson coming through tomorrow to help swap out a bathroom mirror, install some kitchen furnishings and mount some guitar hooks on a wall. We used a walk to weigh plans and picked up refreshments in case they’re peckish. If they have a beard and wear red, I’ll bite my tongue.

Nothing went right for about half a day, until it did. A couple of hours chasing a slow motion lightning strike is never fun, especially when the chicken dance to catch Zeus’s eye doesn’t work. But then you search for something else, and what you didn’t know you needed falls right in front of you.

Weird relief on several levels was the day’s vibe: a returning rhythm of work against the holiday run up, chopping off ten days’ facial scruff, bracing for strangeness only to find clarity and familiarity in an algorithm-suggested album, driving slow in morning rain, the just-dodged nighttime gig.

When the smoke goes up, you grab your phone and jacket, slap your chest to make sure your key card is still in your shirt pocket, put on your hat and stride toward the elevator and down and out to the street for a slow trot toward the scene of the only real story happening that day: someone’s loss.

I should have known when I saw heavy equipment there the day before. In a way. I wasn’t surprised when I approached the corner this morning through rain and traffic to find signs blocking it off. Knowing the right way to go around, avoiding backed up rain, was handy; having time to do it was better.

Back at it, thinking about what’s not breaking, checking to see what might break, trying to feel some type of way about what’s already broken or just on the brink. What can be fixed: the blocked off lanes, the curb outside the ransacked restaurant, the vehicles with flashing hazards, their drivers?

Any memories I have of this stretch of the avenue are most likely properly rated by now, more than two years after moving away and three years after last working just down the block for four years. I’ve had just enough of it not to dream and to hold me now that I’m onto other stretches and avenues.

There’s no way to rest but to rest. Be still, stay home, spend time puttering with the broom, with lunch or with the cat or with the sun briefly warming up the room around you. Let the snacks set aside do their thing, drink the broth if it should appear, and get in the bed at a reasonable hour.