(no subject)

I am bound and determined to salvage my pickles, even if I have to soak them in Kool-Aid to do it. I'm going to let half of them keep brining for a few months and pop the other half into some Kool-Aid Pickling Juice. We'll see what happens.

Also, this is 53% of Chicago, and this is me. I make about $2040 a month, not counting book sales which are unpredictable (and dwindling, naturally). I pay $1000 of that to rent. I'm not griping, because I chose to live alone and rent where I did, but I'm not exactly alone in this.

For years people have known that the housing shortage in Chicago is not due to a lack of availability, but rather a lack of available apartments. All the buildings went condo, and nobody can afford to buy condo, so huge buildings of condos are empty while apartments rise in price because they're hard to come by. I am incredibly, unbelievably lucky to have found a good apartment in a quiet building in the area I wanted, let alone on the block I wanted, for an amount I could pay. Obscenely lucky not only to have found it but to have had enough lucidity to overlook its flaws and snatch it up.

That said, I do occasionally wish to do some renovation. I wonder if the wall between the kitchen and living room is load-bearing....:D

(no subject)

Because of two other peoples' carelessness, I stayed an extra half hour at work today. Which is not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but I had to let them know, because Boundaries Are Good, and also it made getting home a bit of a trial because there's a Cubs game on, so the El was...crowded. I understand drinking at a game, especially if your team is losing, but I have yet to understand drinking before a game. I root for the Cubs, but lord do I hate Cubs fans.

I'm making an early night of it, I think; I'm tired, and restless, and sore. I was going to order in -- which is a story in itself, whereby I went from horrified fascination with the Double Down chicken "sandwich" to considering recipes that would allow one to re-create a slightly less disturbing version to discovering stuffed chicken wings are served locally by my favourite Thai place. But man, I'm in that "I'm so tired that everything's too messy" headspace, so I'm going to eat a sandwich and try not to think about how badly my living room needs cleaning.

I think a nap sounds good.