I can occasionally be photographed. It looks a lot like this. Enjoy!

It’s rare, but sometimes the Abyss has visitors.

We’ve lived in this house for over three years now. Three bedrooms feels like the lap of luxury after our single-wide. Before we moved in, we scouted the house. I brought a tape measure and scoped out the smaller bedrooms. One was slightly larger than the other. I called dibs for my home office. (I was still working at home at the time. Something the Universe snatched away the day after we moved in.) The smaller room went to one of our gerbils that was still home nesting.

Eventually that gerbil moved out and entered his “no permanent residence – mooching” phase. (Where he remains to this day. It’s not a specific place. It’s a state of mind.)

The room he left behind was devastation. Firefighters showed up with sniffing dogs to look for survivors. The Governor declared a state of emergency. The President himself even circled the scene several times in his helicopter while on the way to the links, and although he didn’t land and actually step out, that still held a lot of symbolic meaning for us.

The walls were covered in gerbil spray. As my wife cleaned, she found dishes we hadn’t seen in years, in various states of decay. At last our collection of flatware was almost fully restored. (Many pieces, unfortunately, were lost forever when tossed in the garbage by our disinterested gerbildentia.)
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