What's New in the West

Well, the typical really... taxes are up, revenues are down, your underage daughter can get an abortion and the first you'll hear of it is when she wakes up with a uncontrollable postsurgical hemorrhage at 2 am. Her school still can't give her an aspirin or mention Jesus without your permission.

Welcome to Cali! Enjoy the palm trees!

So anyway, your intrepid but lazy blogger chick here has been busy. I'm taking Aikido three days a week and really just doing my best to not get too injured. I feel really bad for my partners when I'm a total wuss and squeak at them when I get my hands half wrenched off. On the up side I didn't get pinched on St. Patrick's when I forgot to wear green, the slowly reabsorbing hematomas all over my arms covered for me.

My push-ups are made entirely of fail. If you mainlined this purity of fail you'd die with the needle in your arm.

I'm on a week off and I feel deprived. No one sweaty is going to sit on me and I'm actually getting a bit peakish about it. Whatever will I do without my base level of abuse? May I have another 20 crunches please?

In other news I've landed a new job. To protect the innocent, and guilty, and to enable me to keep my nice paycheck, suffice to say that I now get to be a regulations Nazi with a company car. NOT SHABBY! On the up side I'm in a field position with no obnoxious bosses or insane coworkers since I work from home/field, on the down side I'm probably going to be talking to my cats (er... more than usual) within a month due to crippling social isolation. This will be interesting.

Of course, the catch is that I have to drive to the OC a few times a week for a while. Now, those of you who live in places that do not move at the speed of meth may have this idea that LA/Orange County is at all like the shows you've seen on the telly. I assure you, the box is lying to you yet again. Everything north of San Diego and south of Santa Barbara is one tremendous parking lot. It is your temporal warm-up for purgatory. One does not just "go to LA." One sits on a single linear square mile of LA for six hours with nothing to admire but the other cars (don't make eye contact, seriously, not a good idea) and whatever the local taggers have graced the cinderblock embankment with. That is, if you can see it through the smog.

So my plan is to get up at 5am, be on the freeway at 6am, make it to the office by 8am if I'm lucky and no one's decided to take the sudden unexpected deceleration permanent nap by the side of the road, work for 8 hours, leave at 5pm and hopefully, HOPEFULLY get home by 8pm. Then go to bed at 9pm.

Ick.

I may be a little cranky for a while. Though I love my manual transmission, clutching in single digit traffic for five hours a day doesn't make one a happy camper.