Old tennents

The girl who lived in our apartment previously is named Sarah Dunlap, which we know because, when we finally got out mailbox key, there were copious amounts of old mail to her in there. Apparently she doesn’t like to pay phone bills.

Don the Landlord came over to replace some lightbulbs etc. the other night, and he took me down to the storage space below us to point out some old furniture crap he thought we might want, and that’s where I found them.

There are three, each more terrific/horrifying than the last. They are pictures, portraits taken in a studio, in a corn field, in someone's living room. Sarah Dunlap is a bodybuilder. Sarah Dunlap is the most grossly manly woman I've ever had the misfortune of succeeding a living place from. And we have pretty-much nude pictures of her.


Don't believe me? Google her name.

How did people survive in the past?

Things I've done since having no internet or computer:

Played Uno
Read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Gone to school a lot
Gone to the library a lot
Played other card games
Uno
Uno
Uno
Read The Left Hand of Darkness
Read Wild Life
Attempted to visit the neighbors (failed)
Finished a 1000 piece puzzle
Card games
Started a 2000 piece puzzle
Read Mr Darcy, Vampyr and Mr Knightly's Diary
Uno
Got stuck on the 2000 piece puzzle
Read The Notebook (not the one you're thinking of. By Jose Saramango)
Read Thirteenth Child
Card games
Cried to AT&T to try and get an earlier internet activation date
Uno, card games
Gave up on puzzle
Started A Portrait of Dorian Grey
Got my computer back!
Baked cookies

Sports

So I went to a Bulls game. Is that weird?

Neighbors

There is a girl living above us. I don’t know if she lives alone, but her boyfriend is often there. They make a good deal of racket, most of which is unidentifiable, but imaginable as them moving furniture while wearing roller skates.

There is at least one boy living next door. He has a band, and they jam on weekdays, but stop around 11 at the landlord’s orders. (Which is kindly of him/them.) Emily says she can hear him swearing when he oversleeps in the morning.

Pilson

Jan 15: Emily picks me up from the airport. (Hurrah! I’ve been trying to get someone to do that for ages.) I follow her from the orange line to the pink line, and then off at Damen. There is a lot of old snow and ice and salt on the sidewalk, which makes pulling the suitcases a chore, but Emily has one and I the other. She leads me through a small gate and down a narrow walkway between two houses to get to the back.
"And this is where I kill you," she jokes.

I am still full from the monstrous double whopper I had at the airport, but Emily is hungry, and so around 10 we walk to get burritos, which is about the only thing you can get in Pilson.
For those who don’t know what Pilson is, it’s like living in Hillsboro. For those who don’t know what Hillsboro is, it’s filled with Mexicans.

Our house is colorful and disproportionate. It has two bedrooms, a good-sized living room, a kitchen for two, maybe three, a large (cold) basement, and a bathroom for one. The walls are Spanish yellow, pea green, baby blue, brown; the kitchen cabinets are red; even the lights are blue and red (except for the one in my room, which is just a single gigantic lightbulb).

This is my room. It’s orange.

Sunday, Jan 30th

Are you ready for 3 weeks worth of entries all at once?

Saturday, January 29th

Finally. A computer.

42

It's been a pretty bizarre vacation. I think I only saw my mom like 4 times. She came home this afternoon to try and rectify this with a mom-cooked dinner and dessert. She said she wanted to have some family time, and celebrate life.

I made her Angelina hot chocolate. I feel that is very sufficient life-celebrating.


She doesn't know I'm still blogging yet, but at some point I'll tell her and then she'll read all the archives and I'll be forced to face my own mushiness if I continue this serious post any more, so I'll leave this at that and anyway, the pie is done.

(hot chocolate and pumpkin pie? oh yes. yes indeed.)

the post before 42

I just have to announce that as I was about to start the following post I felt something tickling my forehead, and, assuming it was an ant (having found one on me the other day), I smushed it.

It was not an ant. It was a spider.

I have smushed spider on my forehead.

The saga continues..

So in case you hadn't figured out, I made it back home and all. Christmas and New Year's and my grandma have all passed, and all that's left is to finish this bag of cashews and the last of the bottle of Reisling I found in the fridge and get packing already.

I thought that when I returned from Ireland that this blog would just fade away.. except that once you've posted on the web, that shit's there forever, so perhaps I thought it would just hang around, unused and taking up web space. Whatever I thought, the point is I hadn't planned on continuing it.

But I suppose I could. Or should?

Living in Chicago is not nearly as awesome as living in Ireland. In fact, by comparison, it's like the septic tank of places to live. But it's nice to have an unlimited New Post page to rant into at the end of the day. I suppose if my Northwestern aquaintence Katie Marovitch can pull of an entertaining Chicago student blog (katiemarovitch.blogspot.com - you'rewelcomekatie), and geeze, if 81-year-old Ursula Le Guin can start blogging, well, then perhaps there's a future in here somewhere. Maybe I should have signed up for that web-writing class.

Then again, it sounded dumb, so maybe not. I seem to be doing just fine so far.
And Chicago is a long way from Oregon, so it can still serve purpose for informing nosy relatives on all the crap I do. (Ha, just kidding guys. Or am I?) Maybe the ever-perplexing readers in Russia will want to hear about how ungodly windy the windy city really is.


So, bottom line: you thought you were done with me. MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA.