I'm walking slowly through my old house in Garden Home, at night, with a quiet, sort of lonely feeling. Alona is living there, and she just went to bed. I go into the living room to turn the TV off. I pick up the little old programmable remote that I used to use, and push a few buttons, but it doesn't turn off the TV (the old RCA I had when I was there), so I turn it off with the front-panel button.

A window is open in the corner of the dining room, where there couldn't be a window because the bathroom is on the other side of the wall. I close the window partway.

There's another window wide open in the living room, the one that faces the carport, and it's very breezy and blowing the curtains around. I close it too, but not all the way.

In my hand is a tube of goo; I look at it, and it's some sort of girl-chemical, probably Alona's. I think I picked it up from the windowsill. I set it down in the kitchen for her to find. I look out the back door into the carport, and notice that it is raining.

I go into the back room. There is a bright red piece of cardboard on the floor, like a discarded piece of a coca-cola box, but most of the room is open. There is an old CRT computer in the far corner, against the wall, and I scoot it out a little bit at an angle, to make it more comfortable to sit there. The screen is so small, I wonder how I could use it. I think it's just an old one, and the computer I mainly use is somewhere else in the house, and has two large flat-panel monitors.