Year: 2011

I don’t particularly have a “bucket list.” I have a few things in life I still want to experience, but don’t really keep them written down.

If I did have a list like that, I don’t know whether I would have ever thought to add “experience a hurricane earthquake on the fifth floor of a building” before the fact.

Like a lot of other people, I really didn’t know what to make of last week’s tremor. I had my headphones on as I plowed through work at my desk in Baltimore. After someone closed a drawer a few desks away, I noticed the empty Snapple bottle on my desk moving.

“Why did she slam that drawer?” I thought. “It didn’t seem that forceful.”

Then I noticed the bottle still trembling a few seconds later. Then I thought I saw something else moving. Then I wondered if something was wrong with me.

A lot of people I have talked to had that same thought pattern. In the back of my head, I was thinking earthquake, but the front was telling me those sort of things don’t happen around here.  I sat still briefly to make sure I wasn’t having some sort of episode then went to make sure I wasn’t going crazy.

I don’t know what I did on my 13^th birthday. I can venture to guess, since it was the middle of August 1981, that I spent some time playing video games and some time hanging out by the pool.

If you had told me then that I could do pretty much the exact same things to celebrate 30 years later, I would have paid a pretty steep price to guarantee that.

In reality, I could think of nothing else I wanted to do when I turned 43 a couple of weeks ago. Since my birthday fell on a Sunday, everything lined up perfectly.

To be completely honest, the thought did cross my mind for more than a few seconds. I almost went ahead and did it.

Let me set the scene before going any further. My wife and daughter went away for a few days to visit friends. I had the whole house to myself, a situation I get to enjoy a few days a year.

I do miss my family when they go on these kinds of trips, but I also enjoy getting in touch with the side of me which is normally suppressed due to rules about cleaning up after myself and making sure everything goes in its place.

Because Maria had not completed the living room painting project, the house took on a completely different feel this time. I think I took more liberties with my messiness because of this situation.

I’m not allowed to help with painting projects – it’s a long story – so I could really do nothing about the minor changes to the room.  Some furniture still sat pushed to the middle of the living room. A paint can sat on some newspaper in the corner. None of the windows had any curtains.

As I sat on the couch the first night, I realized that the minor amount of disarray seemed a little confusing. It felt like I had just moved in or had seen some other major life change. The lack of curtains and area rug covering the hardwood floor made the biggest difference.

That’s when I started to think of the possibilities. Spending time home alone always leads to massive amounts of grilling, staying up too late and not making the bed. This time, however, something better came to mind.