The thing with having to wake up ’round four to be at the airport for an early-morning flight is that my head won’t actually let me sleep till then. At half past two I blinked awake, ready to go. I’d been having a dream in which something crazy was going on with the air control in the apartment, so that it was blasting cold air into the room, making big black- and green-spotted lumps of cotton-woolly fungus sprout all over the place. In the dream, I managed to turn off the climate control, but I still had to clean up before the cab got here.

Still, awake at three a.m. is not so bad. If you are lucky like I am lucky, awake at three a.m. means a bowl of the Frankenberry cereal Gab gave me when he was in town. It is pink, with marshmallows. It is good to eat while smiling at the layer of snow frosting outside.