Wednesday, March 31, 2004

I have always been one of those people who is always cold. Don't know why...

In Texas Air Conditioning was practically the bane of my existence. It didn't seem to matter what the temperature outside was, the air conditioning was always too cold. Here in California, it's exact the opposite. I would swear that people here don't believe in using the AC at all. I understand that it's not as hot, but it still gets over 80 - which is my high temp tolerance.

Still no AC.

I started working this last week at a company in Carson. They have AC, but it doesn't really get cooler inside than it does outside. In Texas, people would keep their air conditioning running at 75 degrees, which in the summer could be as much as 35 degrees below what the outside temperature was. That's what I'm accustom to. Here, some buildings seem to be lucky to have AC.

I feel like my internal thermostat is broken.

Monday, March 29, 2004

Some people are really shitty. I just have to say that, sorry.

When we got into LA, our room mate called some people who lived here that we all knew from Austin. All of whom said that they would help us out when we got here. No one did. We spent our first week in that hotel in Torrance, running to interviews, looking for an apartment, and chilling out as much as we could while we watched our money dribble away on the room.

I think that 3 people and 2 huge dogs were too much for people to handle. Still, they should not have offered if they didn't intend to help. One couple did offer us a couch for a night, BUT that night they were having a party for a bunch of swingers. (If you are not familiar with this, it's exchanging sex partners temporarily) . My SO and I are not into that so we were left to sleep in the car for a night before we got our apartment. Our roomie had a place to sleep, since the couple are really his friends and didn't mind getting groped by strangers.

The apartment locater we found was the most helpful person in finding a place to live. I know, "duh." However, the way apartment locators work in California is totally different than in Texas. In Texas, the locater gets a kick back from the apartment complex, so it's all free. The locater drives you around, asks all the hard questions you forget to ask, tells you which apartments are most likely to rent to you. Here in California, however, the apartment locators charge you for providing access to their database, then you do all the driving and calling. I LOVE the locater we found. Imagine Harvey Firestone as your locater - it was worth the $150 just to be entertained by him. He asked us what we were looking for, what we had that might disqualify us for any apartments, and what the price range was. He told us EXACTLY what to say to the apartment managers that would make us sound like more desirable tenants, how to talk about our dogs in a way that would make the apartment managers more comfortable, and told us what neighborhoods were safe for us to live in. He literally told us he was searching for apartments in areas "where a pretty girl could walk around buck naked at 2 AM and not have to worry."

We went to one service that we paid them their money and they sat us in front of a computer and said "there you go." Crappy service, if I ever saw it. The only listing they had were in not so nice neighborhoods. The listings weren't in Compton or Watts, but still not safe at all.

Thursday, March 25, 2004

Oh, and by the way..ignore all the super PC laws here in Cali. Everyone smokes!!! Don't let the "no smoking" in a restaurant/bar/club law fool you. Like I said Everyone smokes!
Here is my first mind bender about California:

What is up with the "pay" toilets? Literally locked public restrooms that you have to pay to get into!!! This is such a bizarre concept to me. Why do businesses to this? I understand the "for customers only" idea, but PAY TOILETS????????? Hello! I'm leaving your store if I'm shopping and can't go if I need to.
The journey across the country was amazing and mind bending. I drove part of the way to California. I had never been in a car for that long or driven that far before.

We left at 4 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday and drove until we thought we were going to pass out. We stopped at a trucker hotel on I-10, about 2 hours out on the big highway. I'm glad we did I wanted to be awake when left Texas. I stared out the window at the state I had always lived in and said goodbye to the scenery for hours as we drove. I fell in love with the windmill farms on the way out of the state. They were so strange, like giant alien plants taking root in my backyard. The sun was setting as we drove past them all and framed the windmills in a purple glow. How was I to know one the most beautiful and alien things I had seen would be on the way out? I need to find some here in my new state so I can go stare at them for hours and contemplate how very, very small I am and how magnificent us humans are for making something so grand.

I cried silently to myself when we finally arrived in el Paso. I knew it was the turning point. I knew that if I made it out of Texas and didn't turn back, that I could make the rest of the trip. I should have done this years ago. I feel so brave after just a 2 day car trip.

I'm sad I missed most of Arizona. I drove almost all the way through, but mostly at night. The SO couldn't drive through the state because he has a VERY old ticket there and a failure to appear warrant. He got the ticket on his last trip driving through almost 10 years ago and none of us wanted to take the chance of him being hauled off the jail.

The worst part of the entire trip was actually coming into California. We stopped in a tiny town in Arizona, right near the border, to let the dogs walk and switch drivers. The city was Quartzville and it was weird....An entire town of mobile homes. As we started climbing the hills and head into California, it started to rain. This was the worst rain shower so far this year. It poured on us all the way to Los Angeles. The SO always visits the ocean when coming to California, before doing anything else. So, we drove down Santa Monica to PHC (in a tiny Mazda and a 26 foot UHaul) and found all the beach entrances closed. All of us were disappointed, so we decided to go find a place to stop and sleep. We went all the way to Torrance before we found a hotel that had a parking lot we could park the truck in.

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

I moved to Los Angeles not quite a month ago. This is how it happened.

As trite as it sounds......It all began when we went to look for a new place to live.

The apartment locator, who 5 years before was friendly and very helpful, was insulting today. We gave them the amount we wanted to spend and what we wanted in a place to live. They scoffed at what we wanted to spend, almost laughed when we told them we had, not only one dog but, two. The options they gave us were in a REALLY shitty and not so safe part of town.

That was the last straw....My Significant Other (SO for short) suggested to myself and our room-mate that we pack our crap, rent a U-Haul, and move to LA. The Roomie LITERALLY fliped a coin. Heads we moved, tails we stayed. It was heads.

It's something that the SO and I have wanted to do for years, but we never had the money before but managed to swing it. We borrowed, sold stuff, and what not to get the money to go. We're here - we have a beautiful apartment in Hollywood that doesn't care what kind of pet we have and our rent is cheaper.

smooches!