self, market

All kinds of neat and strange things happened today:

• At lunchtime today I went to the Coin Shop to buy a few silver dollars, and while i was rummaging around a box of old American coins, a bright disk jumped to my attention, and an emphatic "Cool!" sprung from my lips. It was a silver ten mark piece minted for the Munich Olympic games in 1972.
  
  
  
  I snapped it up for three dollars, fairly certain that it was a good deal, and just basking in the glow.
• Tropical storm Bonnie is coming, and her harbinger popped up out of nowhere right over Blythewood, SC right at lunchtime. The sky was astoundingly dark & eerie -- like I've never seen it before -- as I drove north back to the factory. What was a few drops on my windshield ever so quickly became gray-out conditions through which I had to drive at 35 mph with emergencies blinking. It was colossal edgy fun considering what I knew could happen if i wasn't careful.
• When I returned to work, all was dark. It turns out I missed quite the spectacle. A lighting bolt (or wind, according to some) hit a tree near the street in the front of our building, and knocked it into a power line. So people were congealing together into groups talking and laughing in the daylit shadows of the office. Strangely enough, what i needed to do at the moment only needed some coworkers, certain papers, a laptop and a cell phone. So i was able to keep busy through the outage.
• Part of that keeping busy was getting to go to the company's new building for the first time. We are attempting to spin off our R&D department into a new company with new customers, and a few stalwart souls are preparing the way for what we all hope we be the rest of us. An associate of mine and I had to speak on a sensitive topic with one of these souls, so we skimmed down a few exits on the highway to the new building for our pow-wow. The scene reminded both of us of about five years ago when we originally started out in a temporary facility in a similar state of renovation. Happy memories and high hopes for all.
• When we got back to the plant, that power was back on, and those that hadn't left early were busy at work again. I showed the coin off to all the Deutschlanders at work that afternoon. One of them said that he had all kinds of old European coins taking up space at his house, and that he would gladly bring them in to work if I would take them off of his hands. I'm greatly looking forward to seeing them. To top it all off, when i activated my Corolla to go home this evening, the LCD odometer read 65000 miles exactly. Maybe I should go shopping for coins more often; cool things have been happening when I do.