The Sunday Five

1. What's your weather?
Hot, humid, and intermittently stormy. We just came back from hot, humid, and intermittently stormy -- a week in Omaha. At least we live on the second floor and don't have the heartache that is a flooded basement. Word. We lived it.

2. Where are you on your way to?
Better emotional health.

3. Are you good with directions?
No. I am terrible with directions. I am possibly the worst person in the world with directions. I navigate totally by landmarks. When we lived 8 blocks from the lake, I was all about north, south, east and west. Walking to work, I would frequently be stopped and asked for directions to the immigration office in downtown Milwaukee. I was so proud to be able to use actual directions in my directions. Because of one-way streets it's a bitch to get to though and sometimes I would pretend I didn't know because it was so hard to explain. It would have been easier to just walk there and have them follow me. But who has the time? Anyway, now that we're in Kenosha and are 55 blocks from the lake, I can't seem to keep those directions in my head. Hubby John can't figure it out since the city is basically like a piece of graph paper, according to him. All the streets and avenues are numbered. The streets run in one direction and the avenues in the other. This is not helpful to me. Is it near Tenuta's, a quick left after Big Star Drive-In, just the other side of the worst strip mall in town? These are the hints I need.

4. Do you know your neighbors?
Sort of. We know our downstairs neighbors because we flooded their condo on the fourth day we lived here. I'm still not completely recovered from that nightmare. We know the president of our association who lives in the building across the driveway from us and we've exchanged hellos with a few other people who live in our building. I've struck up an e-mail correspondence with a plucky 80-year-old woman in our building who is working with our alderperson to rid the area of kids playing paintball. The rest of our neighbors we know based on the nicknames I've given them -- Ciggie Butt Woman (the woman who leans over her balcony and smokes -- although I think that may have been a temporary lodger since I haven't seen that person recently); The Squatters -- the people who are living in a condo across the way from us and who we believe are renting out the bedrooms separately (note to self: call alderperson); The Germans -- because they're German. And super tidy. They only have one tall-kitchen bag of garbage for pick-up every week and sometimes it's not even very full. Spooky.

5. What do you smell?
Garlic and onion. Hubby John is cooking up a pasta feast with spinach and feta chicken sausages from Whole Foods!