April 29, 2006: My First Day Alone in New Jersey

Hard to believe that I have been here for over a month now and I haven’t had a single day alone to myself since I started the new job. Today is my day to just relax. To take it easy. To take out the garabage. The garbage has been collecting for two weeks. Mostly it is just cardboard and other packing materials from the shelves and futon and chair. I finally got that all cleaned up along with the regular trash and took it out to the dumpster. I love having a dumpster. That is so much nicer than having to have trash pickup. You can get rid of everything the moment that you get it and you never get stuck in a situation where you are storing large amount of trash waiting for to get taken away. And you can take care of it immediately and instantly the house is cleaner.

Deborah Walley

For a late lunch or maybe an early dinner today I ordered a pizza from Pizza Plus and some corn nuggets. I figured that it was time to start trying out some local restaurants. The pizza was okay. Nothing special but it was edible. But the fried corn nuggets were awesome. I popped in Gidget and finally finished the movie that Dominica and I started watching last week. It really isn’t a very good movie but it isn’t that bad. There was about twenty minutes of Gidget left and then I watched Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Wow is that movie bad. For some reason they decided to replace Sandra Dee with some massivley ugly girl who is totally unattractive and comlpetely awkward. You can tell from the acting that no one in the scene could think of her as being attractive and the acting is weird. She really comes across as “ugly girl acting like an ugly girl would think an attractive girl would act.” I can’t imagine what they were thinking when they cast her. The only highlight of the movie is that it has Carl Reiner in it.

After torturing myself with bad Gidget movies I watched My Father the Hero which I thought that I had never seen but once I started watching realized that I had seen long ago. Probably on television or something. It is a pretty good movie. Nothing ground breaking but it is cute and it has good people in it. I had bought it for Dominica because she really likes that movie and it got brought down here for her to watch but I ended up watching it first.

I went into the bedroom after the sun had gone down to find a DVD. In the darkness I saw something large moving on the wall. It was very dark and there is no light at all in the bedroom because we don’t have more than a single lamp in the entire apartment yet. So I ran into the living room and grabbed the lamp and ran back into the bedroom and plugged it in just in time to see a centipede run into the BED!!! And, of course, I spent half an hour trying to find and kill it but I was unable to. It never came back out again so somewhere in the bed is a centipede. An elusive centipede at that. And now the living room is dark and there is nothing that I can do about that. It is going to be a really rough night with very little sleep. I can tell all ready. Having acute chilopodophobia really sucks. Spiders don’t do this to me at all.

I tried to put the incident out of my mind as much as possible (while still regularly going into the room to see if the offending creature had decided to emerge from its hiding place) and, after about an hour I got Remington Steele put into the laptop and I was merrily on my way to 1980’s television land. More or less. It is very difficult to forget about a big, nasty arthropod hiding in the bed just waiting to feast on my neck as soon as I lie down for the night. That is really a pain because I had originally planned on going to bed early and getting up when Dominica got in but I really don’t want to go to sleep by myself as long as that thing is in there. Why? Why centipedes? Why not anything else? Argh!

I got some important web design work done tonight that I haven’t had the chance to devote the mental energy to in way too long. That was weighing on me and I am relieved to have it taken care of. I hate having projects that never get finished. I find them increasingly difficult to complete and I find that they mentally interfere with other work that needs to be completed.

With all of my spare time today I managed to not only finish watching all of Remington Steele Season Two but also to finish watching all of the DVDs that I have here in the apartment. I guess that I will need to send the ones that I have back home with Dominica. Next weekend when I am home I will have to try to remember to pick up some that I haven’t watched yet and bring them down here for days like today. Having the laptop sitting right beside me while I work on the computer seems to work out pretty well. I wouldn’t say that I was super productive today but I managed to relax a lot and still get a decent amount of work done.

Dominica and Oreo arrived around 3:15. By the time that they got in I was really exhausted and I was looking forward to getting to bed – centipede or no centipede. Actually, as the night dragged on and after I spend many, many trips into the bedroom scouring the room looking for the little bastard and not finding any trace of him the panic began to wear off and I started to lose the feeling that he was going to jump out and get me at any second. Chances are that he probably either died when I moved the bed or he made a dash for it and is somewhere else entirely by now. It doesn’t seem like hanging out in the bed would make much sense for a centipede for any length of time.

Leave a comment