I handed in the keys to the old place yesterday.







Katie did a walk through with me and I showed her all the water damage from the leaking roof and the still un-repaired tuck pointing under and over several windows. Also we looked at the badly repaired bathroom tile falling into the tub and I explained where to send my deposit as none of these issues are my fault. I am still coughing up little bits of moldy basement as I actually swept the whole thing out – including all that glitter that Mitchell left behind in his studio corner.



I have a few random chemical burns from a variety of cleaning solutions fighting for dominance in my dermis and I am sore from wrestling two dead dryers and a dead washer out to the curb, but otherwise I am none the worse for wear. A random stranger offered to help me in exchange for the chance to take and fix the washer. He just bought a house in Bevo by Mary. People tell me that St. Louis is an unfriendly city. That just hasn’t been my experience, but then I tend to meet people fairly easily. I’ve thought about where this ability comes from and I think it has something to do with moving a lot as a child and having to repeatedly start my social network over again. I am sure there are lots of factors and the moving thing is just one of them.

We’ve had a few parties to attend this week. First Bethany was in town from KC and arrived with a chocolate fountain for Chris and Vanessa.







We had a roasted pork loin and much good conversation. We also got chocolate everywhere. I am told we will attempt a repeat performance with this modified croc pot on New Year’s Eve.

Last night Jes and I went to a white elephant party hosted by a friend of mine from high school, Rebecca, and her husband Tim. Jes got a bar of sandalwood soap and a Camille Paglia book. I got Survivor the Home Game for the P.C. It’s going to Good Will unless you want it. I might read the Paglia book, though the essays were compiled 1994 and are fairly topical to that cultural moment.

It seemed as though half the guests at the party – held in Sunset Hills – we from a two block radius around our new place in the city. I think this area offers a great deal in that it is a very liberal section of the city. It’s architecturally attractive, has many very good restaurants, and is affordable for people with our level of education and employment. My old place was really beyond my means.

St. Louis is a small town when it comes to socializing and Jes and I both knew an assortment of the people at Rebecca’s party from other contexts. When R and I first split she moved in with a mutual friend from college, Ann, who also works with Rebecca; Ann and her new roommate Nicole were there and they live just a stone’s throw from us.

Tim is actually a good friend of Jerry’s (history professor from the ville) ex wife. Mike, a film guy from Webster, knows Mary H. and he swears he and I have met before. Jes knew a guy named Tom who used to work at a clay wholesalers and is dating a girl that I knew from my old job at the H.A.C. Parties in the peer group can get to feeling a bit incestuous but in a sense we all have academics and art practice/education in common and many of the people there were teachers of one stripe or another. Sharing professional interests, I suppose it isn’t surprising that the connections overlap.

Many of those guests will bolster the ranks of our own looming soirée, we are both a stop and a final destination for many folks so we will see just how many people this place can hold.

God is in the details...

I am a coffee drinker. Jes made me some coffee the other morning and when I went to get a second cup I took a little sugar from the sugar jar. Jes has cleaned all the jars and refilled them. Do you see where this is going? So I took a sip of my very salty coffee and asked Jes where the sugar might be. She said, “That’s funny because I had to dump out the first cup I made for you because I put salt in it.”

Yeah, we don’t know where anything is. I know I own a lot of socks but I can’t seem to find any of them. All the boxes are unpacked so it’s not like I’ve just missed the sock box.

It’s raining here today and while our new backyard is a beautiful garden, it lacks grass. On rainy days Bastian gets long walks so our furniture does not become mucho muddy. I have a long to do list today, so I best get on with it.

Stat Counter sayeth, "The path to your blog is oft a strange one."

drill down 2 18.18% pictures of cloth couches sectionals made in 1991
drill down 2 18.18% copying sim card listening conversations bourne identity
drill down 1 9.09% http://fulcrummonkey.blogspot.com
drill down 1 9.09% poetry fix writers almanac
drill down 1 9.09% paper router neighborhood
drill down 1 9.09% ted the arch kshe
drill down 1 9.09% woman with chisel and mallet
drill down 1 9.09% he's moving out song seventies
drill down 1 9.09% mural of biddy mason postmodern

You know how people are always asking you to move when you have a truck…. The same is true for vans. Here are Kat and I with four twin beds with box springs from the people for the thing.





And girl’s motorbike has motion problems so it had to get rescued from the winter haven of my old garage…





Impressed?

The old place:



Slightly out of focus bar:



New Living room:





Fitz at meal:

I guess you’d call this a development

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051227/GPG0101/512270493/1207/GPGnews

New Life:

I feel like a bit of a crack whore surfing around from my new office. It’s good to be plugged back into the mains. My life has been a sea of stuff of late – we were mostly unpacked by Monday night before Christmas, but then we had to wash and dust everything and we both got sick from all the in and out in cold weather. Then there were the late items to bring over, like the washer/dryer and the fish tanks. My nephews helped me with those. It seemed for awhile like every time I went over there was still another van load to go.

I’ve been going over everyday to clean. When M.B. moved out she left a trail of books and other sundries which I’ve organized and left by the front door. It seems she’s abandoned them then I will donate them to Good Will on Thursday if they are still unclaimed by then.

Politic: At a certain point one is just too old to have roommates. You become too set in your own ways. I could list one hundred petty things that were driving me crazy by the end of our little tenure together and I am sure she could do the same. She certainly didn’t sign on for the third roommate as Jes essentially moved in there soon after we started seeing each other. Anyway, we had a good run over these last few years and I think both of our new living arrangements will suit us far better. I am very much enjoying a smoke free house.

In terms of shedding skin, I’ve made as many trips to Good Will as I have to the new apartment. We have a table in the basement that is covered in stuff that I don’t need. Some of it is overlap as our mutual kitchens merge, but most of it is just crap.

It’s a little hard to justify much blog time right now as there is so much that needs doing. We are off to shop for discounted house wares – we each have grandmother chairs and we are trying to get matching chair covers from Kohls.

We are cat sitting for a friend and actually have the cat here with us until Wednesday. The cat is a little afraid of Bastian, but they both manage to sleep with us and are generally tolerating each other well. Jes and I are thinking about getting a kitten to replace M.B.’s cat Bozo – a hard thing to do as Bozo is a great cat. Bastain has raised several kittens in his life, so I think kitten is the way to go even if it is a little hard on the furniture. We’ve started to look but it will be a process until the right match shows up.

That’s enough rambling for now – there is work to be done.

Ho, ho, ho baby Jesus....

I am blogging from Jes' father's house over in Illinois. I just folded a turkey's wings into a half Nelson so he'll fit better in the deep fryer. I've never had deep fried turkey before, so I am looking forward to the treat. I still have no internet connection at home yet but Jes' mom and David did get us a wireless router for the new place, so when it does come up I can blog from any room on the laptop!! We are both fairly ill with a flu something that we need to kick before the New Year's party. I am stupid with cold medication. We will disinfect everything before party guests arrive and then I will recommend regularly dousing the mouth of all participants with booze for the durration of any visit; that's a good standard policy. Ok, off to check on the fire that they are building in the next room. -k-

I have a few tales to tell but they will have to wait. I am out sick - very sick - not sure what I have, but it is ugly. I started sneezing from the dust and mold of moving and now it has gone everywhere in my body and I am one big perpetual sneeze. Unpacking helps with that, really it does. I am also going through withdrawl as my former flat mate was a heavy smoker and I am no longer getting my second hand fix. FYI for New Year's Eve - the new house is a "no smoking" home, but I have a lovely back yard and front stoop.

So now I am at the library getting my internet work in as my DSL won't get patched into the mains until the 27th. I wish they'd told me that before I had the old connection turned off. Christmas shopping is done and I am in dire need of a nap. I can tell from my tone that I am a little grumpy as well, so it's off to unconsciousness for me. I hope you all are well and have a good thingy with the whosites.

I am shutting down the office now and moving the last stuff – will be back up with pictures in a day or two.

The internet connection is being moved Thursday and so I will resume a more fluid blog schedule when I have a new office to blog from.

That said, as long as I am here I might as well write. I just posted the fragment that I had started on yesterday when Kat showed up to volunteer coordinate me. I have some pictures on the palm of my van loaded down with four twin beads and their box springs that I might post later.

An elderly woman in Clayton donated a bunch of furniture to the thing for the people who shall not be named due to the contract which requires secrecy. Have you noticed more and more of these shhhhhhhhhh contracts in your life? I think that in the donation case it is appropriate, but in the case of the place that I arbite for it seems less about anyone’s protection and more about protectionism in the isolationist sense: a pessimistic proprietary perversity propagating paranoia.

Mary just called. She is in a love fest with her new puppy Champaign – a pure bred French bulldog from a breeder up in Iowa. This breed was a favorite of French prostitutes and all other libertines who wished to be or emulate the Bohemians. The French have always been obsessed with Foucauldian dynamics of dominance and submission, so given the historical context of the breed one must ponder the fine line between paper training and water-sports. Just a little bit of transgressive humor there for you Mary.

I am in the clutter and appliance stage of the move. Today will be the last vestiges of the kitchen. This afternoon I think the fish shall follow. This evening perhaps the washer and dryer. Tomorrow I’ll move the berputer, as Rachel’s daughter Ali used to call it. It’s only the twentieth so that leaves many days to clean the template for the next occupants of this space.

Moving stirs up all kinds of sediment, not only the literal detris lifting out of the rocks in the fish tanks and the dust in the air, but the objects that are metaphors for moments in the past. You are forced to look at things that you’ve kept but haven’t handled in some time. I feel like a recursive prospector on a second or tenth sift through the same wash of sand discovering some gold, some foolishness and everything grainy from the weathering of time.

I just threw out this metal ring that I had saved from when Michael moved out the last of Richard’s things. It was a small brass tube that I found in the garage and have kept slipped over the necks of random bottles of booze. I’ve no booze now, none for seven months anyway, so I’m telling myself that I’ve got no place to keep the purposeless ring. I guess it wasn’t purposeless in that it was a Richard reminder that I’ve just let go of.

Richard was my landlord before the corporation bought this place. Sometimes I take a can of coke over to his grave. He used to send me to the store for coke and cantaloupe, only if I was going already of course. I’ve written about Richard before, though not in some time. I suppose he’s part of why I’ve stayed here so long, maybe even considered buying at one point. He’s a piece in a puzzle tied up with the loss of my own grandfather while I was away at school and unable to participate in his passing.

I’m a little haunted by Richard’s son’s lack of fidelity. He’s a few years gone now and there is still no tomb stone, just a wire placard and some plastic flowers. Considering what they sold the building for, money should not have been a problem. Two hundred and seventy thousand dollars ought to cover a two foot slab of granite.

Richard’s cemetery plot is just a few blocks from here and I can see his section from the road as I drive up Olive Blvd. He’s lying just across the street from the Good Will if you want to give him a nod. We used to watch Cardinals games together in his half of the side by side, or in the hospital room when he was on his way out. One of the last things he ever said to me from the bed at Barnes Jewish was, “If it weren’t for The Dominican Republic St. Louis wouldn’t have a team.” That’s worth a chuckle for Richard as I make my own way out of the home that we shared.

Richard gave me and my many friends access to this home. My relationship with this address began with him shuffling to the right hand door trailing an oxygen hose and telling me that he liked me better than the boys that he had already rented the place to. Ruthann and I moved in a few days later. Four years and four months later, three years since Ruthann moved on, I’ll close out the Delmar chapter in this lived life.

Kathy, my new landlord, has planted a stunning garden that I can help her work in the spring.

I woke up this morning to the casual chatter of the Bosnian construction team rehabbing the building next to ours. I live in the city proper now. I think our area is called Tower Grove Heights, but I’m not sure of that. The tribe showed up en masse yesterday (Sunday) to help with the move, thank you to everyone who participated in the Karl has too much shit moveathon. There are still pockets of material resistance, including Jes’ bike Matilda which is having some starter/fuel line problems.
Mary just called and is off to Hannibal to pick up her new dog. I would go with her but am volunteering for an organization that I volunteer for to pick up some donated furniture and sundries from… Kat is here must go.

Jen asked for a moving update. Jes and I started taking truck and van loads over early in the week in between papers and tests. By Wednesday we had most of the living room, everything from the guest room, and half of the dining room moved just doing one or two trips a day. I am trying to compartmentalize tasks by thinking of them in terms of rooms and I have so much stuff that I wanted to clear a staging area by cleaning out the main floor first.

Yesterday Brad and I made only two trips over but we got all the books packed, which is a lot of books, and the bookcases moved. We also moved one of the fish tanks and my festive Saran wrap trick worked great. Essentially what’s left is this computer, clothing & fabric in general, two fish tanks, dressers, bar, kitchen stuff, washer, dryer, dishwasher and dog. I took most of the sectional couch (we kept the sleeper section for guests) to goodwill and they wouldn’t take it. So it went to Missouri Council for the Blind instead. It’s sort of funny to have your stuff turned down by goodwill.

The new place is very cute. The neighborhood reminds me of Philadelphia and we are just around the corner (practically less than walking distance) from a great Pizza bar called The Blackthorn Pub. They have Guinness on tap and a shuffleboard table. Honestly they remind me of the old Dukum. Our deep dish pizza took fifty five minutes to make and was well worth the wait. I haven’t had pizza that good in several years. I like the new neighborhood very much! Ah well, back to packing and thanks for asking.

I am a king of skilled procrastination: a meditation on time and technology…

My final paper today, and of the semester, is a short observation journal. I have to write a page for every hour of observation and nine are required for this class. I have eight done and I just finished writing the last few up. This is for a class in disability awareness so I’ve arranged for the human resources director of a local services organization to give me a tour.

The tour is at 1:30 and the paper is due at 3 pm. That leaves a half hour travel and writing time. No problem. When I have to write under pressure then my perfectionism leaves me and I can just write. I know it’s hopelessly neurotic, but it’s not an uncommon neurosis in academia. My speed is way up; I wrote a fourteen page take home midterm yesterday in a little over two hours.

So here I sit in my favorite library as my printer at home is all out of ink and there is no point in buying sundries like ink at this stage in the term.

I’ve noticed that I am becoming an increasingly wired and cyborg-like with my “time saving” devices.

A few weeks ago Jes gave me an early Christmas present of a Palm Pilot. I’ve downloaded all kinds of useful functions and I’ve begun using it for navigating my crazy schedule and all the things one uses palms for. I have a check book program to help me manage the vapor, a few shareware games, I’ve put Word and Adobe Acrobat on for school downloads. It also has a digital camera and can play MP3s. That’s convergence baby, all your devices in one place and it’s the same blue as both my cell phone and the shirt I am wearing now; all things for synergy in this the most synergistic of worlds.

I like to do my work to Jazz, so I copied a bunch of Miles Davis onto the memory card. Playing the music files tends to burn through lots of juice so I have an adapter that I can plug into my car’s cigarette lighter and a different one I can plug into any USB port that siphons power off the computer. Computers in my school’s libraries consist of key boards and flat screen monitors mounted on a steel cradle. The computer hardware sits behind the flat screen and looks like a very small piece of Samsonite luggage no larger than a folded laptop.

There are two USB ports in the side into which I have my jump drive and the palm plugged. I, in turn, am plugged into the palm via head phones and the jump drive via the monitor. My eyes track the color in this electrochemical surface. It does its best to pretend the white page and the black ink, hypothetically hammered into place by a daisy wheel or some down strike armature, and those precursors are themselves shadows of the typesetter’s diligence. That’s time for you, my grandfather made his living as a photo engraver; a family trade of woodcarving adapted from the hobbies of shipwrights on the Great Lakes into chiseling metal to match photographic prints. He was a “typesetter” of images in the latter days of a Guttenberg world.

In my ears it’s May 1952, twenty one years before my birth, and Miles Davis is playing that Coltrane classic Dear Old Stockholm in one of only two sessions that he did for Capitol Records. He’s a little strung out on heroin and you can tell because of the “flat” passages and his occasional disappearance and resurfacing. Even still, his bad days are some of the best days and if you’re not up on that story line go read James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues or watch that Otto Preminger classic The Man with the Golden Arm.

Memory, time, media, manna: it’s a circular circuit of information transfer, a multimedia orgy, a radioactive bath of ones and zeros simmering me in a shimmering illusion of productive options for the manipulation of signs. It’s a decadent buffet for the Calvinist elect on the far side of the digital divide. It’s time for me to go to the next thing…and the next…

Moving is simply an excuse to dust.

I am still chasing little academic papers around and stepping on them as I complete my current academic term. By three p.m. tomorrow I will be fully done and I can get on to the task at hand: my relocation. The new apartment is both smaller and less expensive than my digs of the last four plus years, so I’ll be living more within my means and without some things that mean something to me. I’m not sure what will get the axe just yet but all of this stuff can’t possibly fit. None of it is worth storing so Good Will may get some of its sales back.

Sorry I don’t have more time to kibbutz but I have forty papers to grade and a nap to get in before dawn.

She’s got a chisel in her hand and a mallet, the kind all covered in white rubber to dull the blow. She’s editing her student’s papers, or rather what’s left of their glazes that have dripped onto the half moon kiln shelves. If the kiln-wash, a watery mixture of clay painted onto the shelves before firing, isn’t thick enough then the beads of dripped glaze weld themselves to the shelf and require forcefully edged extraction.

I helped a little with the kiln last night, removing and putting in new pots for firing. Metaphorically I am currently thinking of the device as a giant bread machine that doesn’t agitate before it bakes. The two machines, bread and kiln, use almost the same control pad and participate in Ron Popeil’s “set it and forget it” eidos.

I am still not done with end of term projects and now there is a new hassle with my enrollment status. More on that after I resolve it as bureaucracy can make the blood boil. Anyway, just letting you I am both still alive and still living.

The last throws of the semester are a little like thrashes. Because I am in fifteen hours of graduate work, I am teaching two classes with three plagiarists (they all handed in the exact same four papers with only the names changed – making that twelve instances of plagiarism), and have finally wound up my internship - I have lots of culminating projects. I am now done with the hard ones and have easy ones left. Still, I am mentally cooked which makes the easy projects seem much harder than they are.

My sister V was trying to make some time to see me and she asked when my last class was. “Thursday morning,” I told her. Unfortunately I realized as I said it that it was Thursday afternoon already and I had unintentionally skipped it. I felt so done after my Wednesday night class that I guess I thought I was. No big deal, I haven’t missed that class more than one other time all term and all we were going to do was the evaluation. She probably chalked the skip up to the snow storm that was in progress.

Anyway, that’s me for one more week and then I am moving. What works for you, Saturday or Sunday?

My past is sometimes a blur. I have this CD by Mazzy Star and I’m not sure where I got it. The most likely thing is that someone left it at a party back at the Washington Street house. Beth, are you missing a Mazzy Star CD? It’s “So Tonight That I Might See” and I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to it like I am listening to it tonight. Ironic.

It’s really quite fabulous. When I was a younger man music was very important to me. I spent a lot of money on cassettes and I was always the one to make the mixed tape for the party, the limo, the whatever. Sometimes my high school friends would all chip in on a limo for no reason and we would glide around the city listening to my music. I would cut in samples and voiceovers between songs, anything odd I could get my hands on. It was nothing fancy, just what you could do with a dual cassette player.

On these booze cruises we’d often end up out in St. Charles at my friend Saul’s house. Saul had a hot tub and his father had purchased two speakers from the Kiel Opera House when they gutted it. If you turned the stereo up to one (out of a possible ten) the furniture in the kitchen would start to slide around. I have great memories of being in that backyard hot tub as the January snow fell.

I’ve been in a rut with music for a few years now. They say when you smoke you lose a subtle sense of taste and then when you quit worlds of flavor reopen. As I come back from a deep depression things that I once loved are new again.

Blah, I took a break this weekend and recharged so that I would have deep pockets of energy to face this final week of classes and then finals week beyond. So now I am in it. I have many papers to write. I wrote a ten page paper yesterday and took a break – I should have just pushed through another one last night – but Jes and Kat were making cookies so it’s easy to see how a man could cave. I am getting behind in my grading already and we are only a week into classes. I need to go academic Zen and just do.


The usual problems are cropping up at school – they are missing a transcript – so I need to get that resent. I am supposed to drop down to undergrad for next semester which throws a wrench into my financial aid. I should have gone to the STEP meeting today and tried to get a job. Instead I am trying to get a few papers written for my four o’clock class. Does it make any sense at all to pay to teach for a semester when I have already been a well paid teacher? I don’t have much time to struggle with that one. I don’t have much time period, so I best get back to work.

Does it make sense to keep foreign money? I just cleaned out a coin box with money from Mexico, Venezuela, The Philippines, Germany, and England. I have quite a lot of bills and coins from England amounting to about sixteen pounds, which is roughly twenty eight fifty in U.S. I cash that in even if the coins are cool, right?

Well, I don’t know if you want to hear about it, the way you like the dark side of life and all, but things have been really good the last few days. I am looking forward to the move and have boxes from Mary all ready to pack. The goal is to be moved by Christmas so I am thinking about getting a truck for that Saturday before. We could move it piecemeal over the next few weeks, but we’d end up spending in gas what we’d spend on the truck and it would be harder to get our friends to help us as the moving would be random. I think it’s much better to do it in one or two trips when we can get the most amount of assistance from the tribe and just be done with it. I’ll just spend some odd free time packing everything and getting it cued up in the living room and then we’ll fire line it into a big ass U-haul. It’s books, furniture, and cooking/drink ware (and the fish). I also have a lot of clothing don’t I? So, tubs of clothing as well.


If you haven’t figured it out already, Jes and I are moving in together. We’re thinking about using Vanessa’s architecture software to do our floor plan. That could be fun. I was out in St. Charles today helping Chris and Vanessa pick up a plotter (sp?). A plotter is a huge printer the width of the back seat of my van that prints poster size whatever. Chris also helped me do a once over on my van, clearing up some starter problems I have been have by simply cleaning all the electrical connections with a steel wire brush. He has ramps, so we got the van up in the air in his mom’s garage with a space heater aimed at the engine and that made a pain in the neck job quite simple. It was my brother, the former owner of the van, who suggested a simple connection check as the probable remedy of the temperamental starter. So, well done there Philip.


I called to tell Phil that it worked and he told me he is off to Boston tomorrow to install software in a solar panel factory. He works for G.E. doing whatever – mid range industrial/software overlap. Phil is… he used to be part of the team of Navy physicists who ran the nuclear reactor on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson. Later he worked physically on the Space Shuttle in satellite deployment systems and early versions of the Space Station. He’s sort of freelance within G.E. now. He’s not the sort of person that people can afford to hire so he essentially works for a unit that hires him out. He trouble shoots industrial problems and then they get someone cheaper to stay on and implement the strategies he’s devised while he goes off to figure out the next problem and the next company. So far this year he’s been in Wisconsin, Rio, and Boca Raton.


My brother Andy may also get a job with a subsidiary of G.E. in Chicago. It would be great to have his twin boys and my godson Michael a little closer than their current California. My brother Kris is a pilot for an airline in Milwaukee who just passed his tests to fly jets. He’s been flying twin props around the Midwest, but the Jet gig means he’ll be flying further and less frequently, so more time with his young son as a bonus there. I feel a little like we’re all drifting back together a bit after the last fifteen years of going in different directions.


Yeah, I come from an odd family. Do you know Margaret Mead once slept on our couch in the Highlands of New Guinea? Sometimes I feel like we’re The Royal Tenenbaums. Once I have a teaching gig I’d like to spend a summer documenting our fifteen years in New Guinea. If it were safe I’d like to go back. It’s not really safe: gold mining, guns, landslides and tribal warfare. Our friends who still live there live in compounds with chicken wire around them and they all employ tribal bodyguards.


This is a “cute” story. My friend Bob once said that if you want to understand me you need to meet my father. My father is in his mid seventies and looks like he’s in his late fifties. We have good DNA. He was in the Marine Corps in Korea and is an imposing guy. As I become more bear-like in my own aging process I resemble him more and more. A few years ago there was a tribal war on one of the stations that we used to live on and nearly every western style structure was burned to the ground, all but one. No one was willing to touch my family’s old house because my dad now has head-man status in both of the fighting tribes.


I am being oddly confessional aren’t I? I don’t normally talk about these aspects of my life as they sound so out of left field and make an odd backdrop for the casual everyday ramblings that I normally write. When I first started going to school as a child and tried to interact with kids who had “normal” childhoods, let’s just say it did not go well. One of the things I tried to do to fit in was have my mom give me crew cuts. I saw my red curly hair as a direct link to the otherness that kids seemed to find so alienating. When I was seventeen I’d had enough conforming and my hair began to inch out. My long curly hair, last short in 1991, is something of a personal symbol of self acceptance. And yet I almost always wear it pulled back in a ponytail, still struggling to conform to a culture that will never know what to do with someone like me, just like I have almost no idea what to do with, and within, it. What can you do with that? Teach.

FYI - my home connection is down and I haven't had time to figure out why. I think it's a password malfunction but I can't find the sheet of paper with all my passwords on it.

I'm in the final push on the term and assignments are falling out of the trees - I have at least six major projects left that I haven't started yet - I swear I've written several hundred pages this term. I am getting quite the portfolio.

I'll only be here (at this blog) randomly until I get my home thing figured out - which will take both time and money I don't have right now. I might just scrap it until I get a line in at the new place. I have really been living beyond my means at my current apartment so it will be better to have less room and smaller bills, especially with natural gas prices going up.

I need to get a dog friendly cat for Sebastian since Bozo will be going with M.B. Suggestions? I went by the landlords this morning to drop the departure bomb, it feels good. I'm a little sad to leave my place. I've been there since R & I moved in, in the fall of 2001 - just four and a quarter years - but longer than anywhere else I've ever lived in my adult life. Ah well, I am off to check on a kiln with girl.