Tuesday Morning on Monday Evening blog.

Cold today. Cold as Swedish Hell. Or maybe not quite that cold, since it isn’t even single digits, though it isn’t much higher than that. Cold as Belgian Hell, to pick a more moderate Euro-climate. Anyway, it’s colder than it has been in many months, with more to come. Of course, winter in December is something of a pleasure. Trouble is, the season doesn’t end when the Season is over.

Even after nearly five years, this job of mine is still an education. For instance, I’m learning the subtleties of laptop use, particularly on a train, where I now sometimes do some writing. It isn’t like writing at a desk in a number of ways, the most important of which is that, except in situations like earthquakes, desks don’t move much. A train, however, isn’t very useful if it doesn’t move, and the vibes from the track reach upward to you and your machine, and sometimes give commands to the machine. Windows open unexpectedly. Whole paragraphs are highlighted without permission. The cursor decides to take a vacation on the other side of the screen (long overdue, maybe, but I’m a slave-driver when it comes to the cursor).

Then there was the matter of Tuesday Morning. My editor sent me a note this morning requesting an article about Tuesday Morning, an oddly named retailer, for the next day – which happened to be Tuesday morning. With a name and a web link, I investigated. I needed to investigate, since it was a chain of stores I’d never heard of. Sometimes there’s a good reason for that – if it’s a brand existing only, say, in California, Nevada and Nunavut. In the case of Tuesday Morning, however, there’s one in Schaumburg. So I not only wrote an article about the company – leading with some financial news that I won’t bother with here – but I also dropped by the S-burg location after work.

Tuesday Morning sells overruns and discontinued items, mostly home décor and other clutter, at discounts from regular department stores. No novelty in that, but apparently the stock at Tuesday Morning is so fluid that you never know what you’re going to find there – which, according to the manager of the store, whom I interviewed her briefly, is one of the reasons people come there. I liked the fact that the store looked mildly chaotic, with piles of stuff here and there, more or less categorized, but not always. That’s how I might keep a store, a sort of doppelganger Target (which would probably fail; I’m no storekeeper).