California Dreaming...

So I just got back last night from my week long trip to California. Leg 1 of Operation California consisted of 4 days (Thursday through Sunday) in LA to apartment hunt. I stayed with Emily (*woot*) in her grandmother's house--which is currently unoccupied--and she and her amazing family helped cart me around LA looking for a place to live. My roommate-to-be, Sonia (some of you might know her?) wasn't going to arrive in LA until Friday afternoon, which was fine--I looked at a few places myself, and we had a few places lined up to look at together. The goal, of course, was to sign a lease that weekend before I began Leg 2 of Operation California. And I was having a great time with Emily and her family, and Sonia and I had some really decent prospects for apartments, and I was finally letting go of my paranoia a bit.

But of course...

At 8:30 on Saturday morning I got a phone call from Sonia. Bear in mind that she literally had been in the state for about 15 hours, having driven 3 days from Texas. The basic gist of the phone call was that she didn't want to move to LA anymore, and she was going back to Texas that afternoon.

You can imagine the not good things that ran through my mind.

After a few hours of freaking out, crying, talking with my family, Emily and her family, and various other people (saints, all of them), and combing Craigslist with a whole new purpose, I found a place. That's right--I now have a place to live! In one afternoon, all my fortunes turned around! *Amen* Emily can attest, it's a fabulous little house in a really nice neighborhood about 15-20 minutes away from UCLA and 4 miles from the beach. I'll be living with 2 other people in the house--I just found out one of them will be a dude, so that should be interesting--and the girl who owns the place has her own separate room off the back. I'm so relieved! Plus, it allowed me to enjoy the rest of my trip. :D

Before I forget, let me share the hilarious story of how I managed to lock me and Emily out of the house. (I take 100% responsibility for that!) We had dinner with Emily's family and got back to her grandmother's house around 11:30, only to find that about half the lights weren't working. So we find the circuit breaker outside and, with the aid of the most heavy-duty flashlight I've ever seen, we reset it. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the doorknob on the back door had a lock that allowed you to twist the knob from the inside, but locks it from the outside. You can guess what happened--yeah, I closed the door. We rang a few doorbells of neighbors, but, as it was about midnight, no one answered. As a result, we walked about a mile to the nearest gas station to call Emily's family for a spare key. I thought we were going to lose it when the gas station attendant said they didn't have any payphones, but Emily explained the situation and he let us use their phone. Emily's mom pulled up shortly thereafter, laughing her head off, and made sure we were inside before leaving us for the evening. I bow to my own awesomeness.

Btw, the lights were in fact burned out, thus meaning our foray outdoors was completely unnecessary.

On Saturday, Steve and his brother drove down 5 hours from Modesto, and he met up with me and Emily at this music and art festival in Santa Monica. We didn't hear much music, but we saw a lot of weird modern artsy stuff and made our own crappy art on projectors, hehe. Then Emily handed me off to Steve, and we stayed with some family friends of his before heading back North on Sunday morning to being Leg 2 of Operation California. I won't go through every excruciating detail of what I did with Steve and his family, but suffice to say I had a great time. We stayed in Mariposa for a night and went to Yosemite, chilled in Modesto for a few days and saw The Dark Knight (REALLY GOOD, but really scary!), then headed over to Benicia on Wednesday to go to a wine tasting before I flew back home from San Francisco on Thursday. And here I am!

Edit: By the way, this is quote from my time with Steve's family just never stops being funny AND pretty much sums up exactly how huge the home-school bubble that Steve and his brothers are from. :P

(ME): Joe, do you even know any minorities?
(JOE): [pause] No.

In other random news, I just got a beautiful new laptop (GO ME), saw The X-Files: I Want to Believe last night/technically this morning at the midnight premiere (I seriously can't express the full extent of my disappointment, as I'm so emotionally invested in the series that to do so would probably send me spiraling into a deep depression), and I now have Skype (now that I have more people to talk to overseas, it seemed only logical)! Shock of all shocks, my username is aznsong50--send me contact info, por favor! Hope all is well elsewhere in the country...Love!

~Jenni