Word Count: 5185 (and our story takes a narration change)

At long last, the apartment was pretty much put together and it was time for her parents to leave. Madeline hugged her parents tightly and then sent them on their way. She stood in the parking lot waving as they drove off back to Wisconsin, continuing after the car was long out of sight.

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I’m not real sure that this is going how I want it to. Perhaps I shall have to change writing styles. Let me introduce myself. My name is Madeline Alice Archer (or MAA!, as I like to call myself.) I am, if you haven’t guessed it already, a librarian who has recently moved from Wisconsin to Baltimore.

And I have a lot of aspirations. You see, I like to challenge myself and I thought writing a novel about my experiences of moving out her might be interesting. But I find myself getting bored with my story. And since now I have our heroine, myself, in Baltimore, I think I am going to change to the first person narration.

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I stood waving at my parents as they drove out of sight. I was totally alone. My friend Kelly was out of town this weekend, and wouldn’t be back until Tuesday. She had arranged for me to get a ride with her carpool on Monday, but after that I had to figure out how to navigate downtown by myself. It just turned out that there were so many details about starting a new job that I hadn’t thought of. It was complicated to move to a new city, and I was only beginning to realize the details I had neglected to even imagined.

After taking a trip to the local grocery store and cooking dinner, I settled down to think about my first day at work. What was I going to wear? I threw open the closet door and stared at my work wardrobe. I had a lot of sweaters, but it was definitely still too warm in Maryland to wear a sweater. In fact, while I was moving in, I had wished that I was wearing shorts instead of jeans. Was this just an Indian summer, or was I in for a dramatic climate change? I eventually settled on not wearing a skirt for my first day. I would wear black pants and my new loafers, a classic look that couldn’t go wrong. And a short sleeved shirt. I set my alarm clock for six-thirty to give me lots of time to shower, dress, and eat breakfast. I was meeting Kelly’s carpool in front of my apartment at eight fifteen on Monday morning. I had only heard about them from Kelly, but I hoped that I wouldn’t have to talk too much.

I packed my lunch the night before, something I rarely did, and then sat down in front of the television. I had a lot of nervous energy to burn, but I didn’t want to unpack my books. After the flurry of unpacking on Friday night and all day Saturday, I was not inclined to spend more time putting up posters and organizing my books. I did, however, have a knitting project to work on. So I busied myself with knitting and purling as I watched bad Sunday night television. Finally, I made myself go to bed.