Still homeless

My little sister found out a few days ago that I was going to Seattle for the summer and promptly announced that she had never met anyone so willing to relocate in her life. :) Well, I am willing, but so far I still have no place to live in Seattle yet. And furthermore, I have no place to live yet once I go back to Boston in the fall. No big deal, right? Yeah...

At the library yesterday, browsing through the travel section, a maybe 8-year-old boy wandered into the same row as me and asked me if he could have 65 cents. As if a close friend of mine had just asked to borrow a quarter to buy a soda, I rummaged through my wallet and gave him some change. Immediately afterward my brain returned and wondered why I had just done that. I've given my dinner leftovers to homeless people in the Boston subway a few times, but hardly ever do I give money to panhandlers on city streets, even though it makes me incredibly uncomfortable to walk past them and pretend that I didn't hear them or don't have any money on me. And I could almost guarantee you that this little boy in the library didn't need any money, but I apparently couldn't say no when he asked. I'm not sure whether this makes me a good person, a bad person, or just a huge sucker.

By the way, in case you're wondering if it's a good idea to drink hot beverages at your desk at work, it's not. I managed to get away with just a small spill this morning, but it reminded me of a time a few summers ago when I knocked over a styrafoam cup full of hot chocolate on my desk one morning as I swung around in my chair to talk to my officemate. The hot chocolate shot out of the cup and drenched my keyboard, dripped into a large puddle on the fabric seat of my chair, and even managed to soak some papers in one of the drawers as the hot chocolate cascaded down the side of the desk. Not surprisingly, my keyboard was completely useless after being soaked in something so sticky, so I had to call the IT people and ask them to replace it. Unfortunately, the only extra one they had looked like it had been saved from an Apple IIe manufactured in 1981.