ILL HOBBIT in Adventures From Prison

My hobbit has been quarantined. I went over to his cell last weekend to pick up his share of our dinner to find that he and almost all of his stuff was gone. Turns out the back pain he’d been complaining about, which I just thought was an ache from his workouts, was shingles. Because there are still men here who somehow never had Chicken Pox they had to separate him from the general population. So right now the poor guy is sitting alone in the Special Housing Unit. I don’t think he will handle it well. He copes with prison by listening to music and doing mail-in Bible studies, neither of which is available to him in there. I’m hoping he’ll be out soon, but with Shingles you never know how long they’ll last.
He is planning on moving into my cell once my current cellmate goes home in December. In some ways it will be nice, in others…no so much. The thing is I’m learning that my Hobbit has some cleanliness issues. I gathered up his remaining stuff for safekeeping and found that the water bottle he uses daily had enough mold growing in it and on the underside of the lid to qualify as a separate country. I showed it to my friend, who does the Hobbit’s laundry, and he said that some of his shirts are the same way. Eeewww. Why is it farm people have much looser ideas of clean than others? I have a feeling that living with him may require some aggressive retraining of the Hobbit. I hope he realizes that I will throw him out if he can’t live up to my standards of clean (which believe me, are not that strict). But I promised to give it a try, so wish me luck this December and we shall see what happens!
UPDATE
The Hobbit has returned after only five days. Turns out I forgot one important thing about the Hobbit – they like living in small holes. He loved his time in the SHU. Even without his usual coping mechanisms, he found it a most relaxing and rejuvenating experience. Weird, weird little man.