Nightmares with a Japanese accent.

What should have been an unforgettable night of serene opulence in our brand new bed actually turned out differently due to a series of nightmares about Japan. Late last night I made the mistake of viewing several devastating tsunami video clips on Weather.com followed by this terrifying headline plastered across the top of MSNBC’s website:

JAPAN WORKS FRANTICALLY TO CONTAIN

CRIPPLED NUCLEAR REACTORS

As I write this post a quarter of a million people are being evacuated around three severely damaged nuclear reactors — all in various stages of meltdown — on the east coast of Japan between Sendai and Tokyo. Japanese officials are insisting the situation isn’t “as bad as Chernobyl”, but they keep forgetting to add “yet” to the end of that sentence. In case you don’t remember Chernobyl — or you’re too young to know what I’m talking about — the meltdown at this nuclear reactor in Russia turned the entire region into a poisoned wasteland from radiation four hundred times stronger than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, causing thousands of deaths from radiation poisoning and forcing the Russian government to move and resettle 400,000 citizens. Chernobyl is still a wasteland today ... 25 years later.

And so that’s why I didn’t sleep well last night. Tsunami videos and nuclear meltdowns. And I’m feeling rather subdued today, too, even though I’ve got leftover Chinese food in the refrigerator and one of my clients just sent an email thanking me for the great job I did designing her new blog. Somebody please cheer me up. Maybe I need lunch.

I hope you remembered to set your clocks ahead last night for Daylight Savings Time. We are all one hour older today. (Yee-ha.)