Well, things change.

Now I am a full-time lockup guard. Freak me green and call me frog.....

I can't say this is my favorite way to spend time. But in some ways, it's like being the night desk clerk at a very strange hotel. Like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. I sit and amuse myself while drunks sleep in the cells. The regulars know my name now. I even found my name in dispatches on the cell walls -- apparently I'm a bitch. I know who wrote that, though, and it was a young man who was trying to convince me that having a cigarette would be a good idea. I disagreed. Especially since it sets off all the fire alarms if I let people smoke in the cells...

I'm fighting the urge to listen to the same songs over and over again. It seems that that is the doorway to manic. Either it's a symptom or it's a cause, but either way listening to OUTKAST doing "Roses" or whatever repeatedly seems to trigger something. I suspect that all of it revolves around lack of sleep but I have no proof....

I'm off tonight. I called (I'm so STUPID sometimes) and volunteered to go in at 6 am . don't ask me why... All I know is that *I* like it when I know when I'm going to be able to go home, so I called and told the person who's working right now that I'd be in at 6...

Apologies for absence. I had not intended the quote from Gnarls to be the only entry last time, but the planned sequel didn't get done.

I've barely been home since the afternoon of the eighteenth. Miguel said to me on the phone today (while I was down in the guardroom yet again) "These long-distance relationships are hard." At this particular moment I should be phoning my mother and responding to emails, but I feel a need to explain my silence.

On the afternoon of the eighteenth of August, I took a call at work. For this. Some calls stop your blood from circulating. I think I handled it ok. The aftermath was time consuming. Somehow I found myself sitting in the morgue for 18 hours guarding the body, and then doing overtime guarding the suspect over the next few days. The paperwork was immense, and Major Crimes were here, big burly guys using our office space.

However, the upshot was that Major Crimes needs someone to transcribe all the interviews they conducted in town while they were here. As in all small towns, I imagine, everyone knew something and wanted to talk about it. So I'm going to be doing that over the next few weeks. The lady I was replacing came back to work this week, too. I found that hard, to give up the job, but it's all done now. And this weekend, due to a guard shortage, I've been working midnights. And while all this has been going on, I've been ill, first with a cold contracted in the draughty morgue, and then yesterday with a killer flu.

So. Crazy, yes. But it's a good kind of crazy.