I’m sit­ting in my office wait­ing for the water to get hot so I can take a shower and get out of here. I am head­ing to the Dactyl art gallery where they have an open poetry read­ing once a month or so that I like to read at. The space is won­der­ful; the peo­ple are respect­ful; there’s almost always some­thing worth lis­ten­ing to — even though most of what peo­ple read is pretty awful — and I have found it’s a good place to hear new mate­r­ial in my own voice. What I am think­ing about, how­ever, is that it will not be too long before this room is no longer my office. My brother-in-law will even­tu­all be com­ing from Iran and we need a bed­room for him, and this room will be it. It’s going to make our apart­ment awfully crowded — my in-laws are liv­ing with us already — but it is the way things are going to be. It’s just a mat­ter of when it’s going to happen.

It’s inter­est­ing liv­ing with my in-laws, actu­ally — since we get along really well and they don’t bother me at all. I get to see where a lot of my wife’s char­ac­ter and char­ac­ter­is­tics, both the good and the bad, come from, and it’s won­der­ful for my son to have a set of grand­par­ents liv­ing with him, though I think he will not really appre­ci­ate that till he is much older.

I’m always amused by people’s reac­tions when I tell them my in-laws are liv­ing with us, but that will have to be some­thing I write about another time. Right now, I think my shower is ready.