The Outdoor Home Office™

(the what?) 

As I am terrified of jumping into the current real estate fray, I shall remain crammed into a cluttered one-bedroom apartment with The Boyfriend The Fiance for the foreseeable future. I've annexed our small balcony, slapped a rug out there, a space heater and a table, and voila! It's no longer the balcony -- it's The Outdoor Home Office™. It gives me a place to write safe from writers' kryptonite: the fridge and the TV.

Let's have a tour, shall we? (Scroll down for scintillating details.)

•    The Outdoor Home Office™ features a very balcony-like railing. Its purpose is to prevent those who toil within its confines from hurling themselves to the parking lot below in moments when the tip of the tongue is not producing that word I can't think of.
•    Ah, the parking lot below. Please note the many, many eternally empty spots are marked "reserved." This is an effort by the extremely irritating condo board to extort $8,000 per each resident who wishes to disable the hover feature on their vehicle at night and actually park cars in parking places.
•    To the left of the photo, you will notice a spindly houseplant whose former incarnation was as a poinsettia circa Christmastime 2003. It lived on a drafty windowsill above a raging old radiator in my NYC apartment, a situation which brought that plant to the brink of death on a near-daily basis. It likes it here much better, as is evidenced by the fact that it has leaves now.
•    The orange booklet on the table is part of my No Plot? No Problem! Novel-Writing Kit. A must-have for the literati elite.
•    My laptop. If you need me to explain that, then you aren't actually reading this.
•    My green Ikea desk chair, which Steve hates with the fire of a thousand suns. He's just jealous that it was made for pixie-sized humans. It has a black memory-foam cushion on the seat, which allows me to write for hours at a time in relative comfort.
•    You'll notice there is an adult beverage on the table. Better than a pep talk by the world's preeminent motivational speaker to land my butt in the writer's seat.
•    Last but not least, you will observe a rug underfoot. It was made in Thailand entirely from recycled soda bottles. Bet that was a bitch to weave.