I didn't realize that as I was kissing her hello, she was kissing me goodbye. Well, then, I shan't cradle you any longer. Fare well in your far, foreign lands; fare well in your high and lofty thoughts; fare well in your affairs and sufferings. My embrace will not slap you in the face as yours has done to me, for now I say unto you: Au revoir! Au revoir ma rêve! Have mercy and kind hands, and wake me not again!

My laptop's touchpad and keyboard died, so it only has mouse function now for some reason. I contacted the manufacturer, and chances are I'm either going to have to ship it in for replacement (which will take a couple months) or just fork out the money to someone outside of the warranty to look at it, which will cost me out the ass with no guarantee they can actually fix it. I'll probably just trade it in so I don't have to worry about the same thing happening in the future. I'd just work on it myself, however I've never even heard of this problem before and have no idea where to begin.

Meanwhile, I'd just use my tower, but it's giving me crap as well. I have no idea what its problem is, and am going to have to see if Dünkel can't come up with something I haven't thought of yet.

I'll be checking in to see what the other writers are doing and probably making occasional posts, however since I'm forced to use the computer labs I'll be less frequent in posting and not be on messenger services at all. Most of you have my email address and phone number (cyberialane@hotmail.com is good) if you need to get in touch.

Weird how not having the computer available in my room has made me, you know, STUDY. The downside is that when I come up with good writing topics I have nowhere to put them and they just vanish (I can't handwrite fast at all, especially not as fast as I can think. I can pound out over 100 words a minute if I need to on a computer, and sometimes even that isn't adequate, so...yeah. Need the compy).

That's it for the status report.

And remember, Germanic kiddos: Bruder vor Lüder! Squee!

William Andrews stood in all of his frumpish glory before the cubicle which he lorded over. It seemed he had the disarray down to a science, making each precisely placed object appear to be totally out of place. No other cubicle had quite the mess that his did, and William told himself that he was proud of that. It showed, he would insist, that he was a hard worker with no time to tend to the shuffling of pens and papers.

The reality of the matter was that William spent most of his day rapping the hairy back of his left hand with a pen, which he would click at different rhythms and disassemble and reassemble again countless times. In all honesty, he wasn’t exactly sure what his job was, and the newspaper for which he worked had only printed the vague words “Editorial Staff” on his identification badge.

Sitting in the empty office, William’s thoughts trailed from the fact that he was the only one in the building to his one-room apartment and seven cats. He wished he could bring all of the pudgy little creatures to lie about his cubicle on the mounds of paper and strange-smelling folders that would occasionally be brought by. It would make it quite like home, he thought, if he could have his cats and a small fridge full of greens and yogurts (which had, despite his strict vegetarian dieting for the past four months, resulted in him gaining four kilograms).

Perhaps, William realised, it was an holiday that he was unaware of. He rose to his feet and made his way to a small television in the crime reporting centre. William flipped on the screen and plopped down into the comfortable chair of the crime report supervisor.

“…into Essex yesterday at dusk,” a woman was saying into a large microphone. “Behind me you can see the absolute carnage that the Red Army has…” Insufferable Liverpool accent, William thought, changing the channel to the London station. “…now seems inevitable,” a tired-looking man was saying on the new channel. “The Communists are requesting the peaceable reporting of all citizens for work and housing assignments, assuring that most will be allowed to-”

William turned off the screen. Thank God, he thought, that my grandfather was a washout and moved to the provinces. If I were Sir William Andrews the Third, I’d probably be dead. Something inside of him urged William to take up arms of some sort and do whatever he could to fight the invasion, however the majority of him simply wondered where he should go to register, and whether he would have to do any manual labour.