I suppose I should tell you what life is like here, in what we would all rather wasn't the fourth largest city in America. (Sorry, Houston, we'd much rather have beaten you squarely, and with trends going the way they have, we'd have done it, too.) There I go again, getting caught up in events, and avoiding talking about life. I'm not very good at this, and never have been. Sorry.

Every morning, I'm up before 4:00 AM. I strip the sheets off the bed, fold them up, and stick them in the closet, from whence I retrieve my bunkmate Josh's sheets and slip them on the bed. I shower, dress, eat a light breakfast, and am out of the house around 5:30 AM. At that hour, the bustle of the morning rush is just getting started; I catch a 34 trolley on Baltimore Ave., and I'm usually in one of the last available seats. It's hit or miss, at this hour, whether the trolley will be one of the last "overnight" trolleys running the diversion route to 40th and Market, or one of the first "morning" trolleys running into the subway to City Hall. If I'm lucky, it's the former; I change to the subway and get whisked to Center City; if not, the crowds get uncomfortable at 36th Street, and it's a slog.

When I get to the office, I start work by chatting with the night shift crew, who brief me on overnight developments. Come 7:00 AM, they'll be headed home with the 2/3 full reverse rush trains while the inbounds are crush load. The rest of what's now the day shift gets in between 6:30 and 10:00; the evening shift will stagger in similarly. There are no longer people crashing in the office; where would they not be disturbed by people working? Those who sleep in Center City and go home on weekends (or more rarely) are now all in the company-subsidised block of hotel rooms. The cots we had set up are now there, overloading the rooms, but the hotels are getting paid sufficiently to not care about that. We still have the cubicles rearranged, but now it's so that we can have a bike rack near the elevator. (I'm proud of the bike rack; I helped lug the PVC pipe from the Home Depot at Pier 70 to the Broad Street Subway, then on the train up to the office.) We're not directly worried about security (there's a checkpoint at the bottom of the elevator, and a camera pointed at the rack).

Every once in a while, the power will go out. This has happened twice while I've been at work, albeit both before residential electricity was rationed. Each time, the power was off for about 30 minutes. This is just long enough to turn the place uncomfortably warm before the A/C kicks back in. When it's happened, I left my computer off another 15 minutes, to make sure that I didn't overload the circuits, or if I did, I let the building cool off again first. Oh, I should have mentioned that the dress code is now "Cool Biz", a way to save on A/C costs we stole shamelessly from the Japanese.

I leave work at around 3:30 PM, nine and a half hours after getting in. Again, rush hour is just spinning up, but since the evening rush is so much less cramped than the morning, I don't go directly home. Instead, I go shopping for the household. I generally stop at Trader Joe's at 22nd and Market, but occasionally I stop by Asia Supermarket at 11th and Race. I pick up what I can, then walk to the Juniper St. trolley station, so I can get a seat on my way home. Dinner is usually around 5:30, with whoever's home then. Josh is a couple hours into his evening shift at CSX's offices at Commerce Square when I'm falling over into bed at 7:30, after watching the BBC News. Seven of us are sleeping nights and working days, and four of us are hot-bunking with the evening or night-shift residents. Power rations is sufficient for two air conditioners, and several more fans.

Eight and a half hours later, I'm up to do it all again. And I can only hope that the world has gotten better while I slept. It rarely has.