Hello Arnold!

Greetings from the capitol city of the fairest state in the nation, the most beautiful place in the world. Clarification: California is the most beautiful place in the world; Sacramento is not. In fact, much as I hate to say it, Sacramento is...well, not much. The downtown area is itsy-bitsy. I drove and walked around for about an hour yesterday and saw pretty much all there is to see. Many of the buildings are being torn down; a lot of construction is going on. It's clearly a city that intends to go somewhere, but right now, it's nowhere.

My husband had to come here for work, and I tagged along. I've been here before, but didn't remember it, so didn't realize how little there is to do here. I've been spending a lot of time in the hotel room as a result. I don't do well in hotel rooms. I'm a jumpy person, and I hate being interrupted when I'm deep in thought. Hotels are full of interruptions. The room phone rang this morning. I was puzzled as to who could be calling me here; anyone I know would call my cell phone. Turns out it was room service, wanting to know if my breakfast was okay and if they could pick up the tray. Housekeeping keeps knocking, wanting last night to turn down my sheets (why is this necessary?), wanting to clean my room today even though I haven't checked out yet. I hate stuff like this. Maybe this makes me sound like a brat. I suppose I am a brat. In mitigation, though, I offer the fact that unexpected interruptions cause my heart to pound and my pulse to race. I'm the kind of person who needs to have my back to a wall in restaurants. If there's a window or a door, I need to face it. Who knows where I picked up this idiosyncratic trait, but it's there.

I thought having new stimuli would be good for me, in terms of shaking me out of the writer's block and overall slump into which I've entered, but my plan seems to have failed. I sit in my hotel room hunched over my laptop like Barton Fink, and all I do is surf the Internet. I've acquired vast amounts of trivia knowledge, but have done nothing productive. It's hard not to feel pretty down on myself right now.