Was Yesterday a Holiday?

It may have just been a series of odd coincidences, but for some reason yesterday felt like a holiday that no one told me about. I started to get this feeling right away in the morning as I hopped in my car and was driving to work.

Usually I take the bus, but on Thursday nights I have Ultimate Frisbee Summer League, so I have to drive to the fields to play after work and it's easier to drive from downtown than to take the bus home and drive from home. I don't often drive unless I have to for two reasons--it's more expensive to drive (parking is $5 at the cheapest place, which is about 9 blocks from where I work) and the rush hour drive in makes me go batshit insane.

In preparation for the snail like pace of my drive up highway 100, which also has construction going on right now to make it even more of a wonderful drive, I popped in the new AFI CD and tuned myself out to the frustrations of moving slower than a glacier. Oddly, when I got onto the on-ramp for 100, where I'd usually sit for about 5 minutes, there was no traffic on it. I blew on past the control lights and merged into the sparse highway traffic.

Now there is usually NEVER sparse traffic on 100 no matter what time of day so to be able to merge right in, continue at my pace of 60 mph, and get all the way up to my exit into Minneapolis in like 5 minutes was undeniably creepy. Not so much in a bad way, but in one of those, "I have entered a parallel universe and should be prepared to be eaten by a gelatinous, flying donkey monster any time now," ways.

So I get in to Minneapolis about 10 minutes quicker than usual, which rocks, and walk to my office building. But before I head off, I noticed that my parking spot was about 4 rows closer to the exit than usual. Weird, but it has happened before. The pedestrian traffic seemed about the same, but it's usually pretty sparse on the streets since everyone takes the skyways. I enjoy the outdoors, however, and only use the skyway when it's raining or over 85 degrees out.

As I got into my office building and headed off for my first wonderful cup of coffee, without which I would not function, I saw a lot of offices closed and cubicles sitting empty. I was actually there a little later than I usually get there so this was rather odd. The entire day none of the empty cubes and offices filled with their occupants.

The drive to my ultimate game was pretty hellish, but that I chalked up to people leaving town a day early for mini-vacations and Father's Day. Anyways, at the restaurant that the frisbee teams go to after the games, there wasn't nearly as many people there either. Did everyone just up and leave the metro area for an entire Thursday? It felt like very much like The Twilight Zone.

So I don't know what it was yesterday and I don't know if today is the same or different since I'm working from home, but yesterday, as it was, was eerie... like Halloween come early.