the small bugs

I ignore breakfast as a meal because it is too much trouble to wake up earlier to make a meal and I am too much of a snob to reach for a pre-packaged pop-it-into-the-toaster option. Coffee is breakfast with an optional piece of toast and Nutella. Coffee is the base of the food pyramid, no?
Since yesterday I’ve been on an oatmeal kick. I had brought it from the old apartment. Oatmeal doesn’t go bad unless gets moist, than it can grow mold. Or if you realize that it is crawling with little black bugs (I guess book lice or weevils). They weren’t there yesterday, or they weren’t as prominent yesterday… Needless to say, I’m off my oatmeal kick again.
This was the reason why I was never a big oatmeal fan. One of my mom’s co-workers kept a terrarium of mealy worms in oatmeal. My young five year old self couldn’t be convinced otherwise that at the bottom of every canister of Quaker Oats there weren’t more worms.
However, after scouring the internets I found some tricks that might be worth trying – unwrapped spearmint gum and keeping a bay leaf in the flour. Inexpensive and it can’t hurt, right?

finally a room of my own

We’re done with moving. After a half a week of packing boxes, most of which were things that weren’t mine, two days of moving everything from one apartment to another, and negotiating with Verizon for timely internet service -- three hours of my time navigating through the bureaucracy of Verizon's customer service where everyone is nice but no one has the authority to actually be of assistance -- and Ikea for a timely delivery, I’m almost all moved in. My room no longer looks like a storage bin for theater people but a proper bedroom because the Ikea furniture has finally been put together and the clothes have all been herded up and shut away in drawers and the closet. I even managed to make some order of the shoe bin!

There's still work that needs to be done. Except for one spot the walls are pretty bare. I should have bought more frames from Ikea or more prints but the idea of decorating exclusively from one place smacks of being nouveau riche and uninventive at worst. Buying a manufactured personality isn’t the solution to a decorating problem. Picking up interesting trinkets and pictures from friends is the solution. There needs to be curtains not just shades. These things can wait – they’re embellishments of a room not the personality.

It’s mine. The rest of the apartment is under the control of the other roommates, but this is my area. It can be as messy as I’d like, it can not match with the main color scheme. But more importantly, I can write when I feel like it, listen to my music. Having a room of one’s own is very nice indeed.