I could get addicted to The Weather Channel, but somehow I doubt that it’s always as spellbinding as it was today. I don’t ever sit and watch news or sports as long at one sitting as I did today, watching the hurricane coverage. Gustav apparently wasn’t as bad as it could have been; unfortunately, it was still pretty bad. “It could have been worse” is small consolation to those affected. I only know I tried to be as much a part of their suffering as I could be, from way out here in California. We don’t have hurricanes, so all I can do is project.

This being Labor Day, I of course worked as little as possible. For me, that means a fairly normal Monday, because anything I don’t do today gets pushed into Tuesday, which is already a fairly crowded day. But this being a holiday also means that I get to sleep as late as I want to, if I can, which I couldn’t because I woke up at the regular Monday time and got up and got at it. But I took a midday break for coffee with a friend, so it wasn’t a typical Monday at all. Or a typical holiday.

There’s actually a saturation point with The Weather Channel, and I think it comes when you hear the same information and see the same videos every ten minutes or so. That’s how you know there’s no new news. They tell you (a) what’s already happened, over and over again, and (2) what they think might happen, despite the fact that they really don’t know. That’s a good cure for addiction to the channel, although I’ll be right back with them when Hanna hits the Southeast.

My big plan was to get back to work tonight and get even more of a head start on the rest of the shortened week. As usual, I flaked. I’m reading the recent Joyce Carol Oates book that’s not about the Jon-Benet Ramsay case, and I finally got to the point where the six-year-old skating prodigy in New Jersey goes missing, so I kept reading past the time I planned to work and on and on until I couldn’t focus on the words any more. Then I watched the late tennis match and popped a frozen pizza in the oven. That’s actually my idea of a holiday well spent. (And those aren’t spoilers, because I haven’t revealed anything that isn’t in the first couple of pages of the book.)