Hey Jakey,

Dear God, have I really worked here for five years? Have we really lived in Nevada for five years? Well, you've only been here your whole life, about 19 months. I worked at my last job in San Jose for seven years, and it felt like forever.

I'm deeply, inenexorably dissatisfied with what I'm doing at work right now. I'm doing lots of everything, and a whole lot of nothing. It will probably get better soon. But in the meantime... drudgery. Perhaps I'm just dissatisfied with working in general. And to think I've got another 30, 35 years left of this... gah... it depresses me.

I thought my last job was pretty unsatisfactory. Not at first, but then I started feeling overworked and underpaid (I was, BTW). I remember taking off on a Monday to drive up to Carson City for an interview with the newspaper there. The interview went pretty well, and driving back to San Jose the next day, I started to cry. I was pretty sure that I was going to get the job, and that would mean leaving all my friends back home. I exacerbated the situation by listening to Iris Dement's "Our Town" over and over, which relates the sadness of leaving a town you've lived in forever, leaving friends and family behind.

Metro was like a family to me. Almost all my friends are past employees of that little alternative rag. I've never had as much fun working someplace as I did there, in its heyday. I was in charge of the Saturday crew, a punk-ass, artistic, misfit, highly intelligent bunch of people, mostly gals. We would arrange "Slipper Saturdays" where we all wore slippers, "Percussion Saturdays," when we all brought in a bang-able musical instrument, and played along with the soundtrack to "Grease" or whatever happened to be in the CD player. There was always plenty of food and American Spirits, and scrounging of marketing shwag off of the editorial peoples' desks. We would get together after work for every birthday, anniversary, whatever. A subset of us, the "Girlies," made an annual ritual of getting together on the beach and doing mushrooms. We all still pretty much keep in touch, although none of us works there anymore. L however, is still my best friend, and we see quite a lot of each other.

So the prospect of leaving all of them was pretty sad. I was excited to live in Tahoe, though. My new job at the Carson City paper started in August, and I drove up a couple weeks beforehand, to try and find a place to live. Your daddy stayed behind in San Jose to finish up the last three months of his contract job, and to handle the packing.

Little did I know, I arrived just prior to "Hot August Nights," an annual classic car extravaganza in Reno. All the hotel rooms within a 100 miles of Reno were booked solid, and the rooms that were available ran about $150 a night. So I wound up sleeping in my truck for the first week that I lived here. I parked in the Horizon Casino's parking lot, and used their restrooms and drank their free drinks at night while I gambled on nickel slots. During the day I looked for a place to live. Ideally I had wanted to live in South Lake Tahoe, and commute to CC every day. But, especially in the summer, rentals in SLT are few, far between, and ungodly expensive. So I found a cute little place down here in Gardnerville, and we've been here ever since. A year after starting at the CC paper, I transferred to the Incline Village paper, and have now been there for four years.

I've made a few friends here, most notably C, but I don't get to hang with her as much as I would like, as she lives in Kings Beach, easily an hour away.

Now that I'm not editor anymore, I get to work with T alot more. He was the one who hired me in CC in the first place, and when he transferred to Incline, I begged him to take me with. We've since worked on a lot of side projects together, and have become pretty good friends.

Yesterday we finished up yet another big project, just the two of us, and once again I had the urge to -- well -- there's this movie, Broadcast News, about network news and a complicated love triangle. There's a scene with William Hurt and Holly Hunter, after a pretty intense live network broadcast, William Hurt grabs Holly's chair and rolls her to him, shouting about how the whole experience was like great sex. I always feel like grabbing T after a harrowing project and doing that, but he probably wouldn't appreciate it, and certainly your daddy wouldn't, if he ever found out. Anyway, T and I work really well together, no matter how much I bitch about him.

So yeah, if we left here and went back, I would miss C and T.

I'm hungry and I'm rambling and not making much of a point, so I will sign off for today. Love you!