In order to burn off every last hour of vacation I would have lost at the end of the year, I had to go to work three hours late this morning. It seems petty on the face of it, but I would rather chew on aluminum foil than give up unused vacation hours, so I went in three hours late.

The trick then was to come up with something I could do to occupy my time for three hours in the early hours of the day when almost no place is open outside the office building where I work. The first thing that occurred to me was, go to someplace that’s always open.

After dropping off My Darling B at the front door of the Hill Farms office building, I drove back the way we’d come, turned off the main road into the entrance to the arboretum, and had a walk around the grounds for thirty or forty minutes. At first, I just walked up the road. My goal was to go to the top of a hill to watch the sunrise, but when I got there I could see I was going to be waiting a while. It was too cold to just stand around and wait, so I stepped off the road onto a trailhead to wander around in the trees and bushes for a while. Turns out there are a lot of turkeys living on the grounds of the arboretum. Big ones. They roam the grounds in groups of three or four, and they’re big enough that they made me wonder if I should be worried about spooking them. No, it turned out. It’s a cliche, but they really were more scared of me than I was of them. They gave me the side-eye and slowly moved off to one side or another whenever I approached, never letting me get any closer than twenty yards, which was just fine with me.

I returned to the car just as the sun came up, throwing the trees into a bright golden light, a gorgeous sight I naturally tried to capture by taking a photo. Failed utterly. And I knew I was going to fail even as I took my camera out of my pocket. I’ve tried dozens of times to capture the beauty of a sunrise with a photo, often enough to get the feeling it can’t be done, but I did it anyway. Maybe I’ll get lucky one day.

After the arboretum I went to a locally-owned coffee shop, savored a danish covered in shaved almonds and nursed a cup of coffee for a little over an hour while I read about the latest garbage fires on Twitter. Unsurprisingly, most of them had something to do with Trump. I say “unsurprisingly” because there is no one who can set Twitter on fire like Trump can. My Twitter feed used to be mostly tweets from the people who use robots to explore Mars, Pluto and Saturn, or from my favorite comedians (if you’re not familiar with Hari Kondabolu, you really ought to do something about that right now), or from kittens and puppies. I get a real kick out of the idea that kittens and puppies can have their own Twitter feeds.

But lately, and again this does not seem surprising to me, all those people have been increasingly voicing their concerns about Trump, even the person who was tweeting sarcastically as the Mars Rover, and generally speaking, the kind of people who explore other planets are smart people. So are comedians (at least the funny ones are; how the unsmart, unfunny ones stay in business is a mystery to me). I’ve followed their arguments and I’ve read up on the ones that really worried me, and I’m going to have to stop doing that because it makes me want to emigrate to the Moon. If only there were a moon base.

The kittens and puppies that I follow have not yet weighed in on Trump. I figure it’s only a matter of time.

I felt that I may have hung out in the coffee shop probably a little longer than decorum would have normally allowed, although there was one guy with a laptop who was taking up a table for four with all the work he had spread out, and he wasn’t even drinking coffee, so maybe I’m still okay. The coffee shop I went to is right next door to a public library, so I ducked in there for the rest of the time I had left, batted out this drivel, and then wandered the stacks for a while, just to be with the books. You really can’t go wrong by just being with the books.