Well, here goes...

     So, after all of the time and effort that Dani has put into this fantastic blog, I guess it is about my turn to write my two cents.  It won't be hard to tell the difference between my stuff and Dani's, because mine will be the ugly plain stuff, and hers will be interesting and pretty!  This will be fairly brief, but I wanted to write a little bit, because writing has been on my mind lately.

     I just finished reading The Green Mile, by Stephen King, and it was amazing.  It is one of those books that makes me want to write about the things around me.  Not the writing that would say, "I am sitting in a chair, typing on a computer.", but the kind of writing that describes smells, tastes, colors, and makes you actually think you are there.  That is all well and good, however, I am not a writer, so this becomes a much more daunting task.  Maybe it is because of the nature of The Green Mile, but I have been feeling the urge to write about my work.  I have been working in a jail for almost five years now, and I have lots of crazy experiences to tell.  Jail isn't what you would expect.  There are no bars, just clear plexi-glass everywhere.  The floors are either concrete, or the kind of plastic laminate that you would expect to see in an older kitchen.  Every housing unit is referred to using the military phonetic alphabet, so Alpha all the way through Romeo.  There are six Pods, or control rooms, one through three being the old part of the facility, and four through six being the new part.  All of the old section of the jail is painted either a sickly pink color, or an unnatural green.  Every unit has an upstairs and a ground floor, with fourteen steps seperating them.  The bigger units have thirty two cells, and the smaller ones have only sixteen.  The old section of the jail is set up in a circle, with the medical section taking up the middle.  The new section of the jail is at the end of an extremely long hallway.  Everything in the new section is freshly painted, and everything is fairly clean and nice still.  The longer a facility is used to house people, the more those people do their best to destroy it.

I go through all of this so that you have at least some kind of an idea of how things are.  I will begin with a story or two when I post next.

-Nick