On Apartment Living

We've lived in our lovely apartment now for two weeks and I hate two things about it; no washer and dryer and no furniture.

I went to Walmart and bought two cheap chairs for Ian and myself. Mine broke after a couple of days and, if I had read the tag, I would have known that the chair was not built for someone of  my weight. Ian still has a place to sit but I don't. I've moved the air mattresses that we use for floating down the river into the house and I'm thinking of starting a new line of furniture that can be used indoors and outdoors. I have to pump up my bed every night and again, I think this has something to do with my weight. My friend Dana suggested I go to garage sales and buy other people's furniture but I don't even like staying in a motel knowing other people have been there...who knows what they've done on the bedspread.

I'm starting to ask complete strangers in the library if they want their quarters; I need 25 quarters every week to do laundry and even then I have to hang my underwear on the cheap Walmart chairs to completely dry. I'm trying to convince Ian that he can wear his shirts more than once and that socks can always be worn two days in a row.

My neighbor Zelda (yes, that's really her name) has a Wiener Dog named Boo Boo(or maybe it's Poo Poo) that she walks every morning and every evening. She has a sexy, husky voice from smoking and insists on sitting under the tree right out our back door and smoking in the evenings. The neighbor on the other side is Lacy and she has a darling one-year old named Annabella, although her other son, Stephen (who came in one day, uninvited and told me he loved our house BECAUSE there was no furniture) is being raised by her grandparents for some reason that I hope she never tells me. The manager is a personal trainer who spends a lot of time in the tanning booth and if I was a really mean person I'd tell her that she will, one of these days, look older than God if she keeps it up.

We don't have cable so we spend a lot of time watching and watching and watching Season One and Two of Reba. As I've told you before, the library here has a really crappy, un-alphabetized selection of movies so I bought two DVDs at Walmart for $5.00 that each have 10 movies on them. No, I've never heard of them, but that's 40 hours of TV watching for $10 and yes, after watching two of them there is a reason for them being on a DVD being sold at a Walmart out of a gigantic cardboard box. There aren't even any stars in their first movie on them just actors that I hope were able to find another job.

On the good side I love my job and my office and my supervisor and the campus and what I'm supposed to do there and even the daily hot lunch in the campus student union (last Wednesday it was stuffed pizza and Cesar salad for $3.95). I'm in the newest building on the campus and it takes full advantage of the views of the Three Sisters. All the walls are painted very, very cool colors of which I'm taking my dress cues from. When I met the Vice-President of the college last week my shirt was the same color as one of her walls. She loved it and then took me next door to another office and told me that she's been looking for a shirt this color, which was a beautiful purple...I like her.

I'm off to visit twelve different stores to trade in my dollars for quarters so I can do wash. Then I'm going to sit in my living room and read one of the dysfunctional novels that I love (it's always nice knowing there are crazier families out there than mine.)