This installation piece is either entitled "Xbox 360, Bowl, Foucault" or "B was here".

I am that wood-burning stove's number one fan.

Matt used to hate the feeling of electric, artificial heat but to me, a space heater seemed as good as a campfire. I get it now, Matt. It's night and day, as significant as the difference between sunshine and buzzing fluorescent light tubes.

When I first moved in back in early September, it was so friggin' hot that B and I retreated to our separate rooms for breezes through open windows, oscillating fans, and privacy. It was very dorm-like. I mentioned before that I missed being part of someone's comfortable backdrop. The cold weather has brought us out of our meat-locker rooms with the leaky turn-of-the-century windows and down to where B's been diligently keeping the stove blazing. And I just sit there on the couch, textbook-laden, laptop glowing, while B plays video games. Occasionally, a log will shift with a thud, spitting out a little cloud of sparks. It takes two people a while to stop being clumsy with each other, to stop stepping on each other's sentences and being too careful with words. I think he and I have finally become domestically at ease.

There are words in relief on the cast-iron stove, and all year it's just been a silent, arcane cipher. Today I looked it up, and it's a Norwegian blessing often inscribed on wood stoves. It translates to:

I rake my fire
Late in the evening
When the day is over
God let my fire
Never burn out

The days have been perfect this past week but the nights are getting pretty chilly. I'm talking long underwear and an electric blanket. I'm talking adhering myself to Nick at night like a snoring, covers-hogging barnacle.

Tonight B resolved to stoke the enormous wood-burning stove downstairs. Drinking a beer while feeling sorry for myself about the paper I have to write beside a flickering, popping fire is far superior to drinking and procrastinating and being cold.

PBR from the future.

B and his friend Crys celebrated B's new tattoo and payday (freaking payday!) by getting me very drunk before 9 pm. They showed me another comfortable dive bar in Athens besides Tony's. Who wants to drink someplace where your shoes don't stick to the floor?

I guess a couple weeks ago they replaced the splintering, hardly-doing-its-one-job-of-being-a-horizontal-plane bar with this acrylic, illuminated number. So now I know what it's like to get bombed on a spaceship.

This house is, um, earthy? There are a fair amount of bugs that are just part of the mise-en-scene here at the house. Most of them I can ignore. Beetles, moths, flies, spiders; these guys aren't trying to start any static. My only real hang-up, is the giant praying mantis that hangs out in the kitchen. This guy isn't sylphlike and green and harmless. It looks like a giant roach with wings and T.Rex arms. And it stares at me while I make coffee or unload the dishwasher, rubbing its Zorak arms together, biding its time. Sjannie can back me up on this.

So imagine my horror when I am sitting on the porch swing, laden with textbooks and notes, and notice that the scourge of my homestead has landed on the window next to me. And it twists its creepy head-part around, Exorcism-style, to fix its sight-orbs on me.

And in a flutter of oily roach-y wings, it dive-bombs my face.

I swat at it and scream. It lands on the window again. It turns its head around. It splays its T.Rex arms like that Jesus statue in Brazil. Again, like a laser-guided missile, it goes for my face.

B has come down to investigate the commotion and rattled, but mostly embarrassed, I explain. He sets out to remove the mantis from the porch cautiously with a piece of cardboard, but we both hear the satisfying crunch of an exoskeleton. He sweeps it into the bushes.

We start into a conversation about what a weird night it is, and our theses, and school, and Athens, but it's obvious I'm still on edge. He says to me, "If it makes you feel better, I'm almost certain I killed it."

From the bushes there's a rustle as the undead mantis rises and lands under the eaves of the roof, right over where we're sitting. Both of us jump up, and B grabs a newspaper, dealing the mantis the coup de grace.

The real victim here is my iPod, the screen of which shattered as I leapt from the porch swing and it crashed into the ground.

How to make an iPod shuffle:
Get a regular iPod for Christmas
Wait three years
Move to Athens
Be a giant baby who is afraid of bugs

I'm not sure whether it was the extra shot in my latte, the way the weather seemed like it was trying to right a personal wrong (sunny and crisp, YES) or the fact that when I set my iPod to random it gave me "Outta Sight (Outta Mind)" by Wilco (usually it saddles me with some painful Nick Cave b-side), but I was out of my skull happy today.

When I was reviewing some basic statistics for my dry research theory class, I thought, "I miss math." For some reason, reviewing all those sigmas and x-bars was like visiting old friends. I guess all this theory and ethics is making my analytical brain act out.

My housemate, B, with whom I have had a benevolently awkward relationship with up to this point, made a huge dinner tonight. So, I take back any silent domestic criticisms I may have had. Dude can cook.