Category Archives: Apartment Life

Life Is A Highway; I'm Going To Drive It ALL NIGHT LONG

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It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and wrote from the heart what has been going on in my life. Turns out I’ve been busy.

It’s been nearly one full month since I’ve last posted, here is the rundown:

  • I got a new job. Yeah, it turns out that I was wrong about my last job; I really did hate it and so I scooted. Ironically enough, my current position is back with the university that I left not some seven or eight months ago. I work in a different position now, however, which makes things a lot better. At 5pm we close up and I’m OUT. No more worrying about what is going on at night if I happen to leave (which brought on a lot of trepidation in the previous position). Really what I like best is that I can freaking stand up and walk around if I want. I have a work computer, but I also bring my laptop so I can work on auxiliary things meaningful to the position (and I found an old monitor in the closet; I’m rocking a sweet tri monitor set up). I have a WINDOW and SUNLIGHT comes through it because I work during THE DAY. It’s awesome. Plus the school will pay for school; I might get another bachelor’s. We’ll see.
  • Outside of work, the condo I live in now is not too shabby. One of the things I complained a lot about at my old apartment is that it was freaking loud; all the time. If it wasn’t the pigeons being loud as hell it would be the grounds keeping mowing and leaf blowing from 8am-5pm. Of course, then I was working nights so the results of the noise was that I could never get a good night’s sleep. Since then I’ve moved to a less snooty place and have been pretty happy with the result. Not only is the rent cheaper, but it’s also waaaay quieter. It’s extremely surprising. When I learned that the condo was labeled with a letter instead of a number I could only think that I was about to enter slumtown and Mel Gibson from Mad Max would roll by in front of the window. Such is not the case. Given, the residence is older, but there are no pigeons and I’m at work when grounds keeping comes by during the week. The loudest thing, honestly, is my cat, who has decided to meow all waking hour because she likes to go outside and watch the birds and other animals that run around. Sometimes I want to punch her face with my fists, but I know she gets kinda bored during the day when everyone is gone, so I don’t.
  • On the show front, I just grabbed a new theme for Pressed & Bound and added Google Analytics to the site to help track visitors. I’m hoping to add some new things to the site to drive some traffic. We’ll see; I haven’t fully figured out what needs to be done, but something does. I think we have a good thing going and just need some tweaks to get more eyeballs on the site and the show. I don’t care if we ever make a cent, but if we can get some people to pick up more novels I’d call it a success.
  • Speaking of novels, I just signed up for the National Novel Writing Month challenge. Basically you take November to attempt to write a 50,000 word novel. If you succeed, the site will give you a .pdf certificate that certifies your awesomeness. If you don’t, no worries, you’re not out anything. You just happened to not finish a novel. 50k is about 1,666 words per day. If anyone wants to join me on this challenge, please say so. Once you sign up, you can add writing buddies to keep track of friends’ progress. I’m trying to get a friendly challenge going with the guys at P&B, so we’ll see how that goes.

So that’s really about the gist of everything that’s happened in the last month. I’ve been trying to get all settled for the most part with the apartment and work so it’s been kind of slow, but hopefully everything will continue to go better.

The Cat Came Back

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Some of you may know that the passed 48 hours have been rather harrowing. Tuesday morning, after a large amount of meowing on the part of my cat, I proceeded to let her out on the balcony so she could go sit in the sun and poof up her tail at the neighbor cats who run around behind the building. I didn’t really think anything of it because over the last couple of weeks she’s been going out on the balcony for a couple of hours and then coming back in, like animals do. So that morning I let her out around 8am so she could do her sniffing, and I proceeded to lay back down because recently I’ve been waking up later in the day.

At around noon when I got up (yeah, I’m bum, deal with it), I went to the balcony to let her back in but she was gone. Not to worry, I thought, as she likes to jump over to the balcony right next to mine and sniff around there too. Upon sticking my head around over the guardrail, I could not see anything milling around over there either. Through the great powers of my deduction skills, I surmised that the only place the cat could be was on the ground.

Normally with cats I wouldn’t really have any problem with them running off for a little while. That’s what cats do. In this situation, however, I couldn’t be so enthusiastic. My cat for the last two years has been solely an inside cat, and while she has been a stray before, where I live now makes it very difficult for her to get her bearings. I’m on the second floor of a four unit building. There’s a door and a staircase that separates the units with some mailboxes in a lobby area there, so even if she thought – in English – “Hey, that’s my building right there!” she wouldn’t really have any means of getting inside.

Shortly after my realization that she was gone and after a thorough searching of the condo to make sure she didn’t somehow follow me back inside from earlier in the day, I quickly made my way outside to do a search. The condo complex has about 15 buildings and the area is mostly paved, but there is quite a bit of grass and squirrels and things too, so my hope was that she just was wandering around looking at birds. Unfortunately, on this maiden voyage I didn’t see or hear her. And then the subsequent times throughout the day I checked the area I didn’t run across anything. I did, however, find a tuft of her hair on my neighbor’s fence right where she would have jumped down from the balcony, so that pretty clinched it, if for some reason the eerie silence in the condo didn’t do that already.

After a few failed searches, I gave up for the night. The following day was pretty much the same. Around the neighborhood searches proved fruitless, but I did post some fliers in some of the condo buildings. I attempted to contact the shelters in the area, but I couldn’t get in touch with anyone. They were “out of the office” for 5 hours. The OKC shelter, which is miles and miles from where I live currently, won’t give out any information on lost pets. In a big city, that’s understandable, but aggravating. So another day of searching didn’t do much. I resigned to put myself in a state of mind that she very well could not return, and I went to bed.

UNTIL

6am this morning. In my slumber, I got a call from an unknown number. One of the residents in the building had a cat on their porch that looked surprisingly similar to the photo on the flier. I jumped out of bed and put my pants on, rushing downstairs to see what’s up, and sure enough, there was Calliope. Joy! The question I have now is whether she was on the porch the whole time or if she just came back. That question has quickly faded, as I don’t really care, but it did come to mind.

So all in all, I can finally rest at ease. It’s a strange feeling to not have a tiny heater sleep with you on the bed taking up all the covers. I can hurry up and get back to being slowly pushed to the edge of the mattress.

By the way, Calliope was napping on my lap as I wrote this.