Second Monday snow day in a row.
Doesn't matter for the jobless, I suppose, except today I'm supposed to hear back from my new department about a solid start day. I guess we'll just wait for tomorrow.

Last night my neighbor came over. A big bottle of Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he asked to use my phone. I told him, "Sure, come on in" and he placed the Bud bottle on the porch railing and stood inside my house, cigarette hand still dangling out the screen door as he called his significant other. They both work at a Long John Silver's in Council Bluffs, as I understand. I'm back at the computer working on a story about hair and watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind without realizing his cigarette hand was still stuck outside with our door open. Ben came downstairs to see what was happening and tell me to catch the last few minutes of the Super Bowl (it turned out to be exciting). Finding the doorway quite cold (being in the midst of a Great Plains Blizzard and all), he informed the neighbor that, indeed, he could smoke in here, we don't care. I went and found an old wine goblet that doubles as an ashtray in a pinch.
Ben went back upstairs while I tried to pretend I couldn't hear the phone conversation. It started out simply enough, a man wanting to know when his love would be home from work, kindly warning her of the winter weather conditions she'd face on her ride home. Then the Relationship Talk started in.
Now I know all is not smooth for the folks next door. My desk stands against the wall separating our townhouses and I hear the yelling, screaming, and occasional striking blow (though whether it's person on person or person on object I don't know). Apparently the neighbor guy was feeling conciliatory last night, however, because he started in on the talking smooth, sliding promises through my cellphone. "We can talk about it when you get home, honey...," he started. "We can do what we talked about, I been writin' out a list. Let's get this behind us. It's just stuff that just ain't right. We can get through this." (Silence) "I saw you left your ring off tonight. It's been off all night. I ain't accusin' of nothin', I just know what I see, we should talk about it. No, I'm sure there's a reason. We'll talk about it. I just don't know that it's right...lots ain't right, we should talk about it, get it behind us. I don't want to...well, we got a kid together. We got a kid together and we shouldn't..." At this point I went from pretending to watch televison to pretending to write again. He couldn't see the print on my screen, so I just made things up. A fake conversation between a news reporter and her son at dinnertime. Backspace...write the same thing, a bit different.
The neighbor finally wrapped it up with an admonition to be careful coming home and (the last of several times) asking if she was going anywhere between work and home. I pretended to be so wrapped up in my work that I didn't hear him tell me he was done.
Ten minutes after he left I went out on the porch to empty the wine goblet and two more empty 12 oz. beer bottles had joined the large one on my railing.
If they had their Big Conversation last night, I don't know. I went over to Stacey's for a while once the game was over and came back in time to watch Mission Hill, eat some Ramen noodles, and fall asleep on the sofa reading Desolation Angels while the same 5 stories looped on CNN.