Short takes

  1. Still no working gasline, so our landlords provided us with a two-burner Coleman camping stove which runs on propane and, if the warning labels are to be believed, will kill us in our sleep using only carbon monoxide.  It sounds like a jet engine when running; I'm making my first cup of hot tea in our new apartment as we speak.
  2. Cool and rainy this morning.  When it's not roasting hot, the apartment is quite pleasant!
  3. A disappointing reporting weekend.  People didn't call me back.  I'm struggling, really struggling, to discern what the hell is "news" about the places I'm looking. I've written a jillion descriptions of places, travels, people, etc in my life, relying on my mellifluous prose and sensitive feelings to justify anyone but me reading the piece.  Not so with news.
  4. Crap, it's raining this morning.  I wonder what this'll do to my commute.
  5. I'm on deadline for tomorrow morning, which means that the thin story I've got -- "Look, Bloomberg has committed that this gorgeous bridge is going to be reopened someday and let the rampaging hordes from the Bronx walk directly over into Washington Heights!" -- is what I'll have to go with.  This is what my RW1 professor refers to as "Get It Written before you Get It Right," i.e. you cannot miss a deadline, no matter how much better you think you could make the story with another N minutes of extra time.  Factually, of course, you **must** Get It Right.  Although ideally one does all three.

Off to drink tea and organize some ideas for tonight’s writing before heading to class.