And They Lived Happily Ever After

Thanks for reading, everybody!

Summer Days, Drifting Away

It has been a great summer. The New Viking and I have been spending most weekends in Palm Springs, where he has a house courtesy of friends who flee the summer heat for a few months, and we're heading to Santa Fe tomorrow for a quick getaway. I'm already salivating at the prospect of floods of tequila and a spa day.

We'll continue to head to the desert on August weekends, and I'm sure I'll then start spending most September weekends at the beach here in town. But my busy time at work actually begins this coming Monday, so it feels like the end of summer. I know that seems strange, since I'll be spending plenty of 110+ degree days to come splashing about, either in the pool or the ocean, but I feel like summer is slipping through my fingers.

I'll get over it. As much as I love summer, fall is my favorite season here and I'll definitely be ready to spend weekends in town for a change. I do miss seeing my friends here, and I worry that they'll forget I exist.

I Want This Too

I love this collapsing bookcase, which is particularly significant to me since I'm in the process of moving my stuff into the New Viking's house. And I have A LOT of books. Since I don't actually have to move out of my apartment until the end of October, it has been a somewhat leisurely process. I'm trying to move at least one box of stuff every week, a feat made somewhat easier than one might think since I never fully unpacked when I moved last fall. I didn't have a place to put all of my books or kitchen stuff anyway, so it's not like I was just being lazy. So my giant closets are gradually being emptied out.

That said, my boxes are so far basically moving from my closets to the NV's garage, since I still need a bookcase to put them in. I've picked out a decent looking Ikea piece (we're making his bottom floor room into my "library" so it doesn't need to be fancy), but the closest Ikea never seems to have it in stock. Rats.

Blood puddle pillow

I have a morbid sense of humor. I want one of these!

Voicemail of the Day

"Hi, this is [Name]. It’s about 5:30 Sunday evening. I saw [the Ex] at the HRC dinner and he told me you guys aren’t together any more.
So anyway, just hope you’re doing okay, and thought I’d call and see if you might want to get together. So give me a call if you want to, my cell is [...] and my home is [...] Anyway, hope I talk to you soon. Okay, take care, bye."

Sun, fun, margaritas

I am very sad to have had to return home from this:

The Disappearing Man

Tap, tap, tap. Is this thing still on? Good. Just checking.

In addition to taking a nice long break from blogging (and I’ve mentioned before that radio silence tends to be the direct result of great happiness), I have been MIA in a couple of other aspects of my life.

I haven’t seen Chip, my roommate, since April 1, nearly a month. You see, I’ve more or less been living with the New Viking full-time lately. I don’t think that I’ve slept in my own apartment at all this month. Oh, I’ve been stopping by a couple of times a week in the mornings, to pick up mail and catch up on everything I’ve TiVo’d. But Chip isn’t a morning person, so he’s fast asleep whenever I stop by. I pay my bills (more than my share, actually, since I pay half of the internet service, which I have never been connected to, and I pay half of the electrical bill, even though I use precious little of it myself), I clean up after myself, I’m utterly invisible (as far as he’s concerned) and I’ve given him eight months’ notice that I’ll be moving out. Does that make me the perfect roommate?

I get my newspapers and my Entertainment Weekly delivered to NV’s house. My computer is in his office, right next to his own. We’re on the same telephone plan. We shop for our groceries together and I cook dinner every night that we eat at home. I’ve begun to monopolize his TiVo. I have begun to reorder the contents of his kitchen cabinets to better suit the needs of a cook. We both belong to a Golds Gym near him, but we’re waiting for the new LA Fitness there to open up so that we can work out together. (The Golds is kind of ghetto during the week, but usually has several hot straight guys there to liven up the weekends. But it’s just so damn small and crowded.)

I have amassed a big enough quantity of clothes at the NV’s house that I don’t really have to drive over the hills in the morning to get dressed. And herein lies a problem. Making the trek over Laurel Canyon on a weekday morning is something that takes 20 minutes if I leave by 7am, but at least twice as long if I wait any later. I drive a stick-shift car, and sitting in uphill traffic in a stick-shift is torturous. So since I don’t have to get back to Weho-Adjacent (as I like to call my neighborhood) to get dressed, I tend to turn off the alarm clock, sleep in another hour, and go directly to work from the NV’s. (I start work at 9:30; not particularly early.)

This means that I haven’t been going to the gym in Weho-Adjacent in the morning at all. Or anywhere else for that matter; my busy work schedule during the last few weeks kept me away from my lunchtime gym too, and I just can’t face all the crowds that go there at nighttime. I’ve gotten a bit softer around the middle, but on a good day I can convince myself that I look nicely “beefy.” Other days, however, I just feel fat. I don’t really look all that different, but my jeans are definitely tighter these days.

What was my point? Who knows.

None of this is complaining whatsoever. I’m still kind of living between two worlds and feeling ever so slightly rootless, but I’m very excited about making these baby steps toward establishing the perfect life with the NV. He’s still my perfect man.

If only there weren’t those damn hills between his place and mine.

Weight: around 180