out of the wormhole

I have exited the wormhole of working two jobs, today being my last day at EPL. Next week will be my first official full week at the Newberry. I am looking forward to being able to establish a better routine that will include working out at the gym, reading books, and writing. I haven't decided whether or not to schedule the latter two activities in the early morning or in the late night. My brain is crap in the morning, so that would seem to rule out mornings. But I get quite distracted later at night.

In other news, our dryer isn't working well and all of our clothes come out smelling musty. Very appealing. Wellesley has begun running up to Tatum's automatic feeder and slamming herself into it (and the wall) which causes a generous amount of food to shake loose. She has already created several large gashes in the all, and I am racking my brain over how to thwart a cat. Sadly no feasible solution has presented itself and the cat has me beat!

new new job

Tomorrow I start a new new job at the Newberry. For the next week and a half I'll be working both of my jobs, which means long days. Oh well, I will have to savor my downtime. While it feels strange to be starting a new job again, I am feeling much less anxiety than I did over starting at EPL. I don't, however, equate this with a difference of anticipation or excitement, but a greater sense of ease over adjusting to a new routine. The Newberry job is full-time and requires a commute downtown (pre-loop really, but fer away enough). But I feel to a greater degree the inevitability of becoming inured to these facts of the job. Well, to the future...

strange after-lifes

I rescued a handful of old paperbacks from the trash yesterday at the library. They included an erotic pulp novel, a book of Havelock Ellis' sexological writings, a books of HG Wells' short stories, and a book on the Marquis de Sade called Philosopher of Evil by Water Drummond. I only learned later that Drummond was a pseudonym for Robert Silverberg, a well-known science fiction writer. I opened this book and saw that it had been published in Evanston in the early 1960s. Intrigued I began searching for information on the Internet. Regency was an offshoot of several magazine and book publishing ventures by William Hamling, mostly science-fiction. Hamling worked with Hugh Hefner at one point and later published a men's magazine called Rogue. He began a line of soft-core pornographic novels under the imprint of Bedside Books, which later became Regency, all of which were run by "Blake Pharmaceuticals". Their offices were on Dempster, between the El stop and Sherman. Well, none of this is inherently interesting, but strange to imagine a cosmos of science fiction fans and soft-core porno writers have once lingered along these streets.