witness to history

Saturdays have a bit of a routine. Often Kristin and I go to the farmers' market, and after that I come home, put away the market purchases, and pretend to be domestic for awhile. Specifically, at 11:00 "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" comes on, during which I clean the house. (Hallmarks of Geekdom, #147: Playing NPR at a high volume on every radio in the house.) I guess either I'm a horribly inadequate housekeeper or I'm ruthlessly efficient, because that hour is the only time I spend on the house all week. (Well, except for taking care of the dishes, if you count that.) Sometimes it's not even a full hour, since the show itself doesn't start until after about a 10-minute recap of the week's news.

So, when this morning started with a cool - but dry, thankfully - trip to the market, I figured it would transpire as per usual. Market, put things away, do other work around the house for a bit, clean at 11. Well, my first mistake, as it so often is, was to sit down. You see, I've been reading this viciously good book, The Devil in the White City, which is a well-written work of non-fiction all about the World's Fair that was held in Chicago in 1893. However, it is also about this creepy psychopathic serial killer who was, um, killing people in the city while the fair was taking place. So it is a book I don't like to read after dark, because it totally creeps me out. (Case in point: Yesterday I read a little bit of it over dinner and then went to practice. Alone. In the evening. In a dark, empty church. Yeah, that was not one of my brighter ideas.) So, I thought I'd just read a little bit of it in the comfort of daylight while I waited for "Wait Wait" to roll around. I flipped on the TV for some background noise in hopes of averting any heebie-jeebies. (After all, I knew I would have to do laundry later, which means going down the dark, smelly, creepy basement. Alone.) All was well, until the Ted Kennedy funeral came on. Just like that, my plans for the next few hours went down the tubes.

I'm a sucker for historical occasions. Remember when Pope John Paul II died a few years back? I was one of those crazy people who got up in the middle of the night in order to watch live coverage of the funeral. And when President Ford died, my family and I stood out in the freezing cold for hours in the enormous line of people waiting to view his casket. Heck, just yesterday I stayed up later than I intended because as I was flipping past the NASA channel I saw that the shuttle was about to go up. (I came in just before they came off the scheduled hold at T-9 minutes. Perfect timing!) So when ABC interrupted their regularly scheduled programming with a view of a rain-soaked cathedral in MA, I was hooked. So much for cleaning! I did manage to get some things done while the funeral was going on, but I opted for the "sitting in front of the TV"-friendly tasks off of my list and instead did the cleaning in a mad 30-minute blitz before going to church to practice.

So I guess the moral of the story is that if you come to my house this week and it seems a little less tidy than normal (because, you know, my house is always spotless - ha!), you can blame history for getting in the way.