Updates in bullet form:

• I have gas. Cooking gas. In the apartment. I can now officially make my own meals. The problem is that I have meetings until 7 p.m. every night this week, and I’m far too tired to actually make anything.
• On the other hand, I should lose weight, right?
• I have internet access via a wireless air card. So I can post and read and watch videos. Again, though – no energy to do either.
• There’s a grocery store on the corner! BUT! Stopping in would have meant not getting “home” until 8:30 tonight. So I stole a roll of toilet paper from the office – it was the one must have that I couldn’t do without.
• Tomorrow my first meeting is at 7:30 a.m. and the last ends at 7 p.m. Which means I may as well plan on tomorrow night being just.like.tonight.

—- Someday, I’ll be able to write something worthwhile again. —-

• Waking up to the sound of the dog snoring in my ear.
• The sun is shining again today.
• My new laptop bag.
• Turkey breakfast sausage.
• A new knitting project from this book.

—- This coffee mug – a Christmas present from my stepdaughter. Aren’t the colors wonderful? It makes me smile with every use. —-

Wage a battle against embitterment and take part in Grace in Small Things. Thanks to Schmutzie, as always.

If you were by here last Tuesday, you know that I moved out of the hotel again and into a tiny little efficiency apartment in a north neighborhood of Chicago. In fact, I only live a couple of miles from her.

I promised pictures when I could get the ones I shot from my crappy little cell phone camera uploaded – so here you go.

One person who doesn’t entertain or spend more than 2 hours awake in it, that is.

The oranges actually do work, it’s the stove that doesn’t – although hopefully, by the time I get there on Monday, it will – the gas company is supposed to re-connect it (and I’ll pay). The pantry came with 1/2 bottle of tequila, though.

—- There’s a bathroom, too, but there’s no way to take a picture in a space that small. —-

Night in the country.
Peaceful, icy, crisply cold.
Moonlight shimmering.

Every once in a while, Mr. Hot will yell at me to “Come with your camera. You’ve got to see this sunset!”

I’m so NOT a fan of winter. And living my split life, I’ve noticed that winter in the country is a different animal than winter in the city. The snow blankets and muffles sounds in the country – silence lulls me to sleepiness by 7 or 8 o’clock each evening when I’m home amongst the cornfields.

Winter in the city seems harsher to me. The noise and the slush and the wind seems to batter and drive to a different tiredness. Not so much a “relaxing with a warm quilt until your eyes won’t stay open” but a “fall into bed and zonk immediately” feeling.

The romantic in me likes the first scenario – I add a comfortable chair, a roaring fireplace, a large hound dog, a glass of warmed brandy and a book to those dreams – getting up only to make my way to the four-poster bed across the room. The one with flowery, lacy bedding. When it’s time, I crawl between the covers and blissfully drift off.

The Hotfessional in me thrives on the second – sitting in bed with reading glasses perched on my nose, a glass of wine on the bedside table, cat purring and laptop humming. Pillows stacked behind my back are covered in high thread-count, stark white cases but a deep red down-filled comforter is just a quick grab away. Falling asleep with those glasses still on my face is not uncommon.

—- And there you have it. I think I’m officially two people. —-

I’m still internet-less here, and so far, no one has seen fit to allow me to, y’know, borrow their wireless connection. So, I’m typing this up in Notepad with every intention of getting to the office early enough to copy/paste/publish before I start nine hours of pricing negotiations. Of course, that’s my INTENTION. We’ll see how I feel when 5:30 rolls around and my alarm starts playing Fur Elise. (Yes, that’s really what it plays. It’s so horrific, I have to get up to shut it off.)

However, I do have a topic. In the continuing saga of Years Go By, I have a request for 1986. Which, coming on the heels of 1987 SHOULD be easy to remember. Yea? Well, not so much.

However! Dizzy Ms. Lizzy married Mr. Dizzy back in 1986, so she wants to hear what I was doing back in the days of big hair and Duran Duran.

Well, Ms. Lizzy, I was also a newlywed. For the first time. I had moved to West-by-gawd-Virginia in August of ‘85 and finished the final four classes for my degree (the school I graduated from allowed me to take the classes elsewhere and “reverse transfer” them back).

(I know, I’m doing 1986, but I graduated in December and this story comes AFTER graduation. Shush.)

In January, I started looking for that elusive first REAL JOB. I also cleaned house every day. Considering there was two of us in a two-bedroom townhouse with no furniture, that wasn’t very difficult. Or time consuming. We had a 13″ black & white television, a hand-me-down kitchen table with no chairs (I sat on a stool, he sat on milk crates), a recliner with a ripped seat, a faux-bentwood rocking chair (also with a ripped seat) and my bedroom set. Lots of wedding gifts (three toasters! two electric frying pans!), but no couch.

Two weeks into the year, I was stir-crazy. I tried new recipes on a husband whose idea of gourmet dining was putting vegetables on pizza. I met the retired lady who lived in the other side of the townhouse – she introduced me to okra. I took lots of walks down to the river hoping that something exciting would happen. Nothing ever did. (I mean, seriously, we lived downstream from a CHEMICAL plant – there should have been weird wildlife or plants or something…)

I begged for a pet to keep me company. I got a fish.

I went on useless interviews. At one, (they advertised for an entry-level financial analyst), I was told that I could PAY THEM to be able to SELL INSURANCE. Of course, since I was unemployed, they’d give me a loan to get certified to sell their insurance products – then they’d take that loan out of my commissions since there was no actual salary involved. They were sure I’d be able to pay them back after selling only 20 or 30 policies. I was sure I was going to tell them where to shove their certification.

On January 28th, I started cleaning out an antique file cabinet that stood in for an end table. It was full of papers collected over the course of years of schooling (his) and although I certainly didn’t intend to become organized or anything, I was so numb with boredom, I figured that I could, at the very least, make some room to stuff rejection letters and extra copies of my resume.

With the television crackling in the background and the fish swimming merrily in his bowl, I sat on the living room floor surrounded by six years of chemical engineering homework. I have no idea what show was on, but I do remember suddenly hearing the news break in.

I turned and tried to watch through the snow. I got up and fiddled with the aluminum foil (no cable) on the antenna. All I could see was something burning in the sky.

Then I realized. It was the Space Shuttle. The Challenger Explosion. All seven aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, the Teacher in Space – dead – 73 seconds after takeoff.

I sat there the entire rest of the afternoon, transfixed by the images and the news reports, mourning the loss of life. The papers eventually got dumped right back into the file cabinet; unsorted they remained.

—- I got a job the next week. But in the year we lived in that townhouse, we never did own a couch. —-