The one-week anniversary of That Which Shall Remain Unsaid. A somber note on which to begin the new year.

I woke to more hammering. Lots of hammering. If it continues tomorrow, I will transform like the Incredible Hulk, shedding my normally innocent and sunny exterior (shut up) and turning into a raging, homicidal maniac, and the world will discover exactly how many shots from a nail gun it takes to kill a man.

Another possible scenario is that something inside of me will simply break, like a fuse blowing, and days later the fire department will break down my door to find me in an endless Stepford Wife loop: "Cricket, would you like some Cricket, would you like some Cricket, would you like some..."

The third possibility is that I may be able to bean a workman with an egg from the convenience of my apartment window and politely ask him to stop hammering before I switch to less breakable projectiles. Dizzying, the possibilities.

Then there was the trouble with my site. For a while, my Earthlink site was inexplicably down. More accurately, it seemed to have vanished. I'd uploaded some files recently, so I knew the site was still there, but Earthlink obstinately insisted it was not. Could I just mention here that Earthlink has possibly among the least attractive 404 pages?

Spaceports.com wins hands down for the worst 404 ever, although when I ventured back timidly to get a screen capture for your viewing pleasure, I found that they'd changed it. Still, the experience of their old 404 stays with you like a horrible nightmare. Window after window popped open, sizing themselves to your screen, all in a screaming day-glo yellow that could have guided fighters in for night landings on aircraft carriers. The only way out of the mess, presuming you wanted the shreds of your sanity, was to quit the browser and never return to a Spaceports site. I see they've changed their ways, but I still don't trust them.

According to Matt S., the sort-of-friendly Earthlink tech-by-chat, they logged five incidents of this somewhat bizarre problem in one hour tonight. He told me at the time that he was "handing it off to our network engineers," which should have reassured me but, somehow, failed to do so. But someone must have done something right, because the site is back up.

While I was waiting, I started imagining the network techs sifting through users' image directories. (I've got a sissy index protection on mine, so presumably they were laughing at other people.) I wanted to ask Matt S. to send me any particularly funny pictures, but somehow I sensed that we hadn't made that vital human connection so necessary for such shared amusement. (He didn't LOL at my lame jokes, okay?)

Anyway. By the time the problem was resolved, I'd FTPd everything to my backup server. The show must go on.

I found myself at City Hall again today, this time with a lighter to relight any blown-out candles. It turned out to be superfluous; the memorial had grown, and there were a dozen fresh red, white and blue pillar candles in wind-cheater glass holders around the base of the flagpole. A number of people were clustered around the poles, and I was disinclined to join them. But a short distance away, directly lined up with City Hall's main entrance, was this circle of flowers.

I was entranced. Someone had clearly taken time creating the circle. Just beneath the blossoms, a faint white chalk line had been drawn to guide the placement, and each flower bore a white tag reading, alternately, "hope" and "peace." We could do with more of each.

I tried to keep that in mind on the subway tonight. Hope and peace. Hope that I would make it off the train before I passed out from lack of air, and peace to keep from body-checking the woman behind me, who had reached her arm over my shoulder to hold on to the same pole and was, no lie, pressed up against me from the chest down (her chest, not mine). I found myself thinking of the subway workers in Tokyo whose job it is to pack people onto their crowded trains by pushing from the outside until the doors close. I don't mind a crowd, but really, people. Hell is Park Street Station at 6:00pm.

I got off the train at Hynes Convention Center and calmed down. It was a beautiful evening, really, perfect for walking the several blocks home and taking deep calming breaths and thinking over the day. And now the cat is snoring gently behind me and my computer is humming softly and Glenn Gould is working quietly through Bach's Goldberg Variations in his orderly, patient style. It's a very pleasant end to a busy day.

And I think: hope and peace are what it's all about. Hope that we can make tomorrow better than today, and peace to share the earth and the experience of being alive. These are good thoughts with which to begin the new year.

I really hope that my peace isn't disturbed by hammers at 8:00am.