Not Yet Awake

And I’m not yet dead. Just in case any of you who might have stopped by in the past few months wondered. More likely however, this will show up as a surprising email from a long silent RSS feed that you signed up for so very long ago to keep tabs on a wayward friend in the Peace Corps. I’m still back in the States and I finally have life back on track strongly heading in good directions. My last random post concerned chemicals. This morning I have a few more stray thoughts and observations bouncing around I thought I’d share. And oh look… the coffee’s ready!

The ultimate alarm clock:
Parking in the school zone next to my house. “No parking 7am – 2pm.”
It’s a hefty ticket if you’re slow. If you’re real slow they tow it.
The joys of street parking in the cities.
The other plus, aside from the necessity alarm, is that I can parallel park into any space at least four inches longer than my truck on either side of the street.
“Need is the ultimate monkey.”

Living in a Studio:
The past six months have been a great re-introduction to apartment living. Bridget and I had nicely place my entire old apartment into labeled boxes for a quick and easy set up. It has been the keeping in the pleasant, clean & organized space that has been the challenge. Small details that had conveniently been dropped from life living in a hut in the Philippines:
Having more than a slight pile of clothes and where to put them.
And that they can easily turn into having more than a slight pile of dirty clothes.
Where do you put all the junk mail that doesn’t fit the immediately pitch or open categories?
Remembering the fridge is not, in fact, completely magical and even it has limits to how long it can preserve left-overs.

The plus sides are still outstanding. For instance, having a bathroom contained in one’s living space definitively beats having it across the yard.

(Humorous Aside: One day a month or so into living here I caught myself about to open the front door to go outside because I needed to go to the bathroom. It’s amazing how ingrained habits can hold on, even in such different contexts.)

I’ve also come to appreciate how much living in an “efficiency” apartment has helped my cleanliness habits. There really isn’t that much extra space, so if you drop everything on the floor, as I’ve been known to do, you quickly run out of floor space and have to live in the mess you’ve created. At least if you have other rooms to the house you can migrate and delay the inevitable massive cleaning blitz, often to the point it becomes an all weekend endeavor. Its been very helpful to have the extra incentive to truly find a home for all the various bits and pieces of life that don’t have an intuitive place to live to begin with. Now the trick will be to keep those habits going once I transfer into an actual house again at the end of the month. I don’t think it will be hard; I’ve really enjoyed the more organized living.

So, thanks to the aforementioned alarm clock, I’m awake. And thanks to the coffee I’m actually starting to wake up. This means it’s off to the day and actually getting some work done. Who knows, maybe I’ll actually update y’all on the state of life next time. You’ll just have to check back and find out.