from chicago: is it night? day? what?

I wake up early, stumble to my computer and check for messages. Bingo! One from my partner in crime, the graphic designer who has been helping me change things from html to readable matter on my new website.

I read it. There is a suggestion and a question. I answer with ten emails, clarifying and asking for new things to be added.

Breakfast. Shake granola into bowl, drink coffee with warm milk. Back to corner of the room where I remain huddled over my screen for the rest of the day.

Work – does it ever grab you? So that there is nothing that you would rather be doing? I have periods like that and this is one of them.

I go over data from last semester’s exams, I make notes on a new class I am to teach in spring, I consider changing some of my travel ideas for spring and summer and then its back to the new website. Text, written a day ago seems flat. I want to change it. I don’t know how to put in changes. Not yet.

More emails back and forth. Jo, the designer, responds. She is quick. I need quick. I am not the wait, for God’s sake, patient type.

Out I go to move the car. City life. My day is punctuated in two hour intervals. Move the car, avoid ticket. Each trip out is my breath of fresh air. I walk to the car, take note of the warm temp, pull my polar bear pajama bottoms up to avoid puddles (do writer type people ever get out of their pajamas? why?), look for an empty spot, go back and write.

By three I need a latte. At least I tell myself that I must surely drink a latte. It is another marker of the passage of time.

I am in Chicago, but I may as well be in Poughkeepsie. I drift in and out of Starbucks (too preoccupied to think about going elsewhere), return home for the last stretch before dinner.