Beat

I think I'm done househunting. Ya, two days househunting, really
thorough, right? It's not like I've even looked at a bunch of places,
it's just that I'm done with it. I don't have the patience to run around
town looking at different spots, weighing the pros and cons, trying to
find compatible roommates, or an affordable enough single person
apartment, wasting pricey gas driving all over the greater Seattle to
Redmond areas with a car weighed down by everything I own in tha back
seat.

I don't have the time, either. I just got home (to the Morins) and it's
past 11:00. Everybody is asleep, and I literally haven't even seen my
hosts today. I go to work in the morning, then FHE or Institute or
househunting, and then I come back here. I got home tonight and was
starving. Everything closes at 10:00, so I wandered around the rainy
streets of Seattle by myself late at night till I found a grocery store
to buy some food. It sounds worse than it was. But it sounds pretty bad,
right?

I know it's only been two days, a silly short amount of time, but it's
going to be like this every day till I move into my own place closer to
work. I think I'll just move into the one place I've really scoped out.
The apartment seems great, the roommate nice, the rent affordable
enough. It has a private room, large living room and kitchen, washer and
dryer, and a pool for the complex. It's about a 15 minute drive to work,
but that's worlds better than the hour it took me this morning. And if I
can get a bus route to take me to work, that would be so much better
than fighting traffic. I'll let somebody else take the wheel. I'll read,
thank you very much. Or blog.

So. Pros and cons, pluses and minuses of the job:

(+) Microsoft provides free beverages to everybody working on the
campus. Juice, soda, water. It's great, most of what I've consumed over
the past couple days has been liquid.
(-) I have to pee every 10 minutes.
(-) The bathroom is in the hall. You have to use an employee ID card to
get back in the office. I don't have one yet. I get to wait till
somebody happens to be going through the door, so I can grab it before
it closes, and I get back in.
(+) While waiting for somebody to go through the door, I can enjoy a
wide variety of beverages from the coolers adjacent to the hall and
bathroom.
(+) There is hot chocolate on those chill rainy days (like today).
(-) It isn't that good.
(-) It looks like I'm downing some coffee to stay awake.
(+) There is more to my job than the free drinks.

I'm the first intern here for the summer at MSNBC.COM. I've got an
interesting project to work on, but if you want details, ask me. I won't
go into it here.

They've stuck me in a sort of "Intern Closet", at least that's what I'm
calling it. I was cleaning up a little today. There was an open orange
juice that looked like it had been there a couple days, till I realized
something was growing on the surface of it. More than a couple days, it
turns out. In fact, some papers laying around lead me to think that the
Intern Closet hasn't been used this year. Glamorous, right?

Don't get me wrong, I like it here. I just need to clean up a little.
But as soon as I started to today, a guy walked in and said he worked in
there. This right after I'd moved books and notes from the desk that
(apparently) is his. Honest, the place looks abandoned. He wasn't there
yesterday, nobody said anything about sharing the intern closet with
some guy that is a) not an intern and b) not on the same team or
project as I am. How was I supposed to know not to move things from the
desk that looked like it hadn't been used in 8 months?

I'm rambling. The job is actually great (I'm not just saying that) and
it'll get better. Good night.

-Sent from Austin's phone.