Coal Mine.

There's an empty pot-pie shell sitting in a paper towel on the curb one block home from where, last night, I said in a coffee-and-booze-free haze (thanks, food poisoning!) the Toad 'goes to work.' A block past that, they're jackhammering out some concrete steps to nowhere. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. I remember when they walled off that porch door around the corner and left the steps; seemed a bad idea then, but I figured: spendy to jackhammer out the steps. Maybe they were just waiting, as I am to side the last side of the building, for the cash flow to flow again. As for the pot pie: nice to think of the highschoolers hitting the 7-Eleven and waiting in the parking lot to bribe some dude to go in there and buy them some Swanson's.

Cold and cloudless, and the only thing that says something's on its way this evening, as the fancies say it may be, is the little persistent breeze out of the west. It's just enough breeze to send the sawdust from cutting the too-long stove logs blowing back in your face. Remember, friends and fans of weather: there is no more important safety rule than to wear these: safety glasses.

Been enough time for the stove back there to take the frost off the insides of the windows, I hope, and so now to make the Toad's having to be a working baby worthwhile. Picture him in a hardhat with a canary. Picture him driving a snowplow. Picture him slinging paper on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile. Picture me watching the clock until one, hoping it both slows down and speeds up.