Oh the winter post-Christmas blues have hit hard, write about summer. Oh glorious heat that makes you sweat and hide in the air-conditioning.

It was uncomfortably hot like most Augusts in Chicago; we bought fresh lemonade from the overpriced vendor outside the museum, and we both commented on how concentrate wasn’t really fresh, and how this tourist spot's lemonade was a fraud. It was sugar water masked with a squeeze of juice.

Merry Christmas.
I hope a little bit of joy drifted into your life today, and if it did not find it's way to you, you got one god damn good story out of it.

It's Christmas Eve, and I am thinking about hyphens. Oh my... The spellcheck on yesterday's post wanted to separate oversized. According to the Chicago Manual of Style, over is a compound that is closed with no hyphen. Refer to the chart on page 383, 7.85, of the 16th edition.

A constant winter gray has descended on Chicago, write about sunshine.

The sun bursted into Kevin's oversized eastern windows, I was startled to find myself waking up from such a deep sleep in a puddle of sunshine. I had been desperate for sleep; searching for it like an addict needing to find their next fix. I looked around, I have been traveling for months, each morning I had to get my bearings to remember why I was not in my own bed.

Write about plastic glassware. When was the last time you drank cheap wine out of a plastic cup?

I ordered another drink and imagined that my new life will be drunken out of plastic glassware like the one in my hand. The stranger settled down, read his book and only had an occasional twitch. I fell asleep with an empty drink in my hand. I woke up to the flight attendant prying the plastic glassware from my hand.

My spell check is confused by midwestern, cap, or no cap.

8.46 Regions of the world and national regions.

midwestern and midwesterner are lowercase, and the West is capitalized.

The Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition

I have changed tense again, and I am taking a machete to weedy words. It has come alive for me again, edit, edit, edit!

I imagined trying to fall in love with this gridded cement city, how I would have to surrender to its massive buildings and leave the mountains and ocean behind me. This is a hard task to fathom knowing that ice will build on the cement sidewalks in December and not melt until March. The West may be wild but survival skills take on a completely new meaning during a midwestern winter.