and the sky is a hazy shade of winter

I hate to pull a Lynn Truss (think Eats, Shoots and Leaves) on everyone, but when will these freshmen learn that quotation marks go AFTER the comma?!

Spending excessive amounts of time, especially relatively late in the day, in a basement really puts a damper on one's mood. If I wasn't such a lousy gardener I'd stick a plant down here in the newspaper office, and fake houseplants are just depressing. Perhaps I should just get a cactus...