sitting outside on my porch, barefoot, glass of juice, laptop.

i’m bad with introductions. i hate burdening someone with the feeling that they should know my name but have forgotten it. can’t we all just go on face memory for the first half a dozen or so times?

the girl in 46 said her name was skylar. i think. she has a dog that likes to bark. which is only annoying at 9 on saturday morning.

i have no idea who lives in 48 (right next door to me). i know they make a bit of noise going up and down the stairs, and possibly speak a language other than english. i saw a woman enter the house for the first time yesterday. maybe i should bring them a pie.

jean and i bought snacks in 95 degree humidity, 45 some odd people came out, sils’s myriad organizations were duly introduced, and chris higgins provided the culminating and encore group introduction. thus happy hour was officially inaugurated.

for a free beer trish walked to lucys in the liquid humidity, made sure no one ended up there accidentally. nathan ate a handful of wasabi peas, took a swill of beer, and proceeded to turn an entirely unnatural and hilarious shade of red. hizzle wore fancy pants, mixed things up with his phd homeys.

did anything else happen? probably. mostly we talked to people about people who were talking to people. by we i mean me. that’s what i really like to do.

postscript: i have a coffee table!!! i am putting my feet on my coffee table!!!

i’ve given myself two days of vacation on thursday and friday. how nice.

tonight everyone came over under the auspices of playing risk (there being several gamers among us). we ended up playing settlers of catan and fluxx.

tomorrow we restart the thursday night happy hour tradition at the library. afterwords hopefully cooking and eating a brown sugar cake at melanie’s.

i have a new coffee table coming (maybe even by the end of the week?) that should do some to brighten up my apartment. still working on chairs for my dining table.

trying to tackle a fairly large website/webdatabase/information architecture project at work. and i’m starting from here. it’s fun to have something new to wrap my head around.

i have no plans to buy a car.

school starts AGAIN next week. this is the 19th and FINAL year i should be doing this. which is fairly remarkable i think. my new slogan: manumission in may!

i get anxious doing laundry in new places. the vulnerability of trucking clothes out in broad daylight. the inability to predict whether the washers will all be taken. the elevator style non-interaction between fellow launderers. the leaving of clothes unattended. the setting aside an entire afternoon of washing, drying, folding.

and yet when it’s done, when the shirts are up on hangers and the socks are in neat little monogamous bundles, i feel a sort of peace with the world. like the collective weight of the laundry is finally off my shoulders, at least for another 3 or 4 weeks.

it’s easy to forget all the unexpected pleasures. washing three loads in parallel. sweating from shear exertion. bumping into people in the neighborhood. savoring wired: a romance out by the pool in the sun! ending up with clean clothes.

finally doing laundry at my apartment complex (without requiring a car) makes me feel like i live here in a way i hadn’t felt yet.

this morning a volkswagen ad caught my eye, showing a long Airstream trailer attached to a new beetle, lifting the latter into the air. and i remembered how much i love the airstream trailer design. rounded. shiny. aluminum. and nowadays: retro. nostalgic. modern.

it seems an appropriate sort of whimsy (or hipster zen) given my current begrudging acceptance of modern life—renting an apartment, paying bills, finding transportation—to consolidate transportation and abode within an exceptionally aesthetic and compact mobile home. no furniture to shop for or walls to decorate. why is the thought of being “done” so falsely seductive?