Apologies for the long wait in between updates, my loyal fans. It
was unavoidable, though. We've had quite an adventure. We are
currently living in Pleasant Hill, California in a cute little
two-bedroom apartment that is much bigger and much nicer (and more
expensive) than we needed, but it is in the perfect location and,
more to the point, we were allowed to live here despite the brevity
of our stay.
James takes the car to work everyday. He drives for 25 to 50
minutes depending on the traffic... I think it's usually closer to 30
to 40, but you'd have to ask him. I have yet to drive since we've
been here. I'm scared of the drivers around here. They are so
aggressive! I am not an aggressive driver, however, and so I feel a
lot less safe. I haven't exactly practiced driving assertiveness.
I walk everywhere that I need to go. Jesse (James' brother) and
his family live about a half-hour walk away... the church building is
about that close. There are three grocery stores that I'm aware of
within that half-hour radius (two Safeways and a Lucky)--four if you
count a restaurant supply store, and if I'm willing to walk a tad
farther, I can get to a Sprouts. There's a post office close by, and
our bank has a branch inside one of the Safeways. And, most
importantly, the library is about a twenty minute walk away.
This is super important because, well, we do not have Internet at
the moment. Our apartment costs us, roughly, a whopping $1500 each
month, and then suddenly we have to pay gas and car maintenance for
James' commute (he used to take the bus when we lived in
Springfield). Oh, and it seems like our grocery bill has gone up too.
I don't know how permanent that is, but part of it was inflated
because at first we didn't know which store has the cheapest Swiss
chard and which store has the cheapest almond butter, for instance.
So, yeah, Internet. If we just live without our home Internet and
canceled Netflix, we have a fair amount of extra money every month.
This has had its disadvantages, but all in all, I'm actually pleased
with the change. What this means is, if I want to use the Internet, I
absolutely HAVE to get off my lazy
butt and walk for half an hour. There's the library, there's Jesse
and Jenny's house, and there's even the church building. We have
enough Internet for our needs.
What our Internet-less home ALSO
means is that both James and I are spending A LOT less time
squandering our life away reading everything to be read on the Web. I
thought I was pretty good about not idling away my time too much, but
apparently there was a lot MORE time I could have shaved off. I've
had to suck it up and pretty much hide all but Griffins and Diltsen
from my Facebook news feed.
This was, I'll admit, a little
heartwrenching. I thought,
Oh
man, I absolutely CAN'T hide so-and-so from my news feed. I heart her
face and I want to know everything that's happening in her life.
And then I realized that I heart too many people's faces, so if I'm
not checking the Internet every two hours every day, then I will have
about two hours worth of stuff on Facebook to sort through every two
or three days. Um, doom. I do not have that sort of time.
So
I ruthlessly hid all-a-y'all who ain't related to me. I figure if I'm
all that curious and I actually do have extra time, I can stalk you
as much as I want by actually going to your personal wall. Brilliant.
Now I only devote about ten minutes to Facebook when I do check it,
and I hardly click on any of the links anyone shares.
I've done a
similar thing with my email account. I ruthlessly unsubscribed from
all sorts of stuff I had previously thought worth my precious time to
look at, but since I now only have a few minutes a week to check my
email, I just got rid of it all.
So, what have I
done instead of browse the Interwebs endlessly when Amelia does not
require my attention?
The
same thing I used to do before I had Internet—or for that matter,
obscene amounts of homework. (Oh my gosh, that was over a decade
ago.) I am reading gazillions of books. Since I've been in
California, I've read:
Small
Gods
by Terry Pratchett,
Introvert
Power
by Laurie Helgoe,
Lords
and Ladies
by Terry Pratchett,
Alcatraz
versus the Evil Librarians
by Brandon Sanderson,
Alcatraz
versus the Scrivener's Bones
by Brandon Sanderson,
Alcatraz
versus the Knights of Crystallia
by Brandon Sanderson,
Alcatraz
versus the Shattered Lens
by Brandon Sanderson, and
A
Spell for Chameleon
by Piers Anthony. I am about one hundred pages into
Mistborn
by Brandon Sanderson and am waiting extremely impatiently for whoever
has
Men at Arms
by Terry Pratchett checked out to turn it in so I can get on reading
all the Discworld books in order. I also have
The
Eye of the World
by Robert Jordan on hold. (I've been waiting to start the Wheel of
Time series until it was finished entirely, and well, it's finished
and now I have no excuse.)
Huh. So I guess
I've really only read eight books in the last three weeks, but I say
that's totally impressive given the amount of time I spend tending
the Amelia-bot. I haven't spent much time socializing with the people
here, but I'm beginning to suspect that I'll be happy without them.
After all, I have enough Diltsen to hang out with and enough books to
read, plus I'll only be here for a little over three more months.
Often, it hardly seems worth the immense effort it takes me to make
friends considering that it took me a year and a half in Springfield
before I felt like I had friends.
The Amelia-bot
2000 had some difficulty adjusting to the new environment at first,
but this was to be expected. I think after about three days, she
finally started to recognize our new apartment as home base.
We celebrated her
first birthday a few days late by eating “birthday cake” (i.e.
rice krispies Dilts-style) with Jesse and Jenny's family. It wasn't
much of a party, and it wasn't even our idea. She didn't get any
presents besides the big box of board books Katie and Peter sent her.
(Thank you!) Oh, and I suppose I got her a xylophone, but this was
unveiled during the big car ride down to California rather than on
her birthday.
Amelia is not
walking yet. That's all right. She is demanding as ever, and I fear
she'd be much quicker if she could walk, so I'll just say I'm lucky.
She loves bathtime
with a passionate fire of firey passion. If I am showering without
her... wo is me! For I shall receive a cacophonous earful in an
echoey bathchamber while she tries her best to climb into the tub
with me, fully clothed. Sigh. And she's close to succeeding in her
bath entry attempts.
All in all, this
is BY FAR the nicest apartment we've ever lived in. I'd probably want
to stay here longer if we didn't have to pay for it. We have a lot of
empty space in this apartment, which I've always enjoyed. Space is
luxurious. Furniture-wise, we have only a queen-sized bed and a
kitchen table and chairs. That's it.
Amelia sleeps with
us, so the second bedroom is essentially the play room. And the
living room is completely bare, so that is practically the
running-around-in-circles room. We have our first backyard (miniature
though it may be) and the countertops in the kitchen and bathroom are
granite (or more accurately they look granite—I doubt it's real).
We have our very first kitchen table and chairs, which is nice,
though I've been shocked to discover that Amelia can reach well over
the edge and can pull nearly everything off of it.
So
perhaps you won't be shocked to discover that, within a week, she got
hold of BOTH my pairs of glasses (despite them having been placed in
what I thought were secure locations), and broke them, fairly
irreparably. One she broke at the nose bridge. The other, she twisted
off one of the arms; it's twisted enough that no screw can hold it
together anymore. Doom!
I
was a little panicked about this at first since I needed an eye exam
for a new prescription... and we couldn't really afford that, let
alone a whole new pair of glasses. But! The Lord always provides, and
we received an anonymous donation from someone in our new ward who
recognized a need and decided they didn't need $100 for themselves.
(I think it would be so cool to be able to do that. This seems to be
one of the many benefits of self-reliance.)
Anyway, so I got
my eye exam on Thursday and then ordered a new set of glasses.
(Incidentally, did you know you can get great deals on the Internet
for glasses?) I knew what shape of lens looks good on me, so I found
one that shape, and this time, I got memory titanium frames. You
know, the basically unbreakable kind that you can also twist around
your finger if you want to. And I even got a hydrophobic and
oleophobic coating on the lenses so they'll stay cleaner longer and
be easier to clean. Awesome!
So yeah. Amelia
the Destructo-bot, should she get hold of my new glasses (and I shall
redouble my efforts to prevent this), will have to work extra hard to
destroy them.
Money is coming
from everywhere. Pay your tithing, folks. That's all I can say. Pay
your tithing and when the Spirit leads you to do something crazy, do
it.
Seriously, I can't
really fathom how we are paying for our little California adventure.
The price of moving and living here is so great that it totally
requires divine intervention for us not to go broke. I'm not sure why
it is so important that James needed to come to this general
relativity (though there are some obvious vague guesses, like meet
other researchers in his field, etc.), but from the very beginning, I
knew he needed to go. I felt like that even though at the time I
thought that meant I'd be in Oregon for four months without him.
But
miracle after miracle has facilitated this experience for us. First,
James' advisor's grant got funded by the NSF—
in
full,
even after the government supposedly cut back on science spending. So
that meant Amelia and I could come too, because James will be
receiving $1000 each month from that grant to help pay rent. Then,
another miracle, we found the perfect location in which I personally
would not go crazy. In fact, this is quite possibly the most ideal
location I've ever lived in for anti-craziness. I could never have
picked a better location if I had been looking for it.
Money is
practically falling out of the sky for us. I already mentioned how
money for my glasses materialized from a kind soul in the ward. I got
a survey in the mail today which I will get $40 for completing, which
will cover the extra glasses expense. We got our oil change and our
tire rotation both for free, coincidentally. James' advisor let us
store all our possessions in his garage for free so we don't have to
pay for storage. Some days, James is getting paid $70/day to take
notes on stuff he was planning to take notes on anyway. And it even
looks like we'll get money for babysitting too, perhaps as much as
$45/week. Um, seriously, the Man Upstairs is just making stuff up
now. He's not even trying to make up good excuses to give us money
anymore or pretend like it isn't Him meddling in our lives. I mean,
getting paid to take notes? Pssh. It's gotten to the point that it's
almost impossible to worry about finances because somehow, everything
is getting paid for with relative ease.
And—there
were even miracles to help me get comfortable here. Not surprisingly,
I felt a bit uprooted once we got here, and I actually even felt some
culture shock. California culture is apparently just barely different
enough from what I'm used to that I feel out of place here. After
about twenty minutes at church the first Sunday, I was extremely
discouraged and lonely. And right when I was feeling my worst, I
looked down at the Relief Society newsletter being passed around—and
I recognized the baby picture on it. I knew that baby's mother!
I
already knew someone in this ward.
I felt so relieved.
And then we went
to a barbeque after church to meet other ward members... and BAM. We
immediately met a Serbian woman who was absolutely thrilled to have
someone to speak Serbian with. She even brought out her visiting
mother (who doesn't speak English) so she could join in too. I was
shocked to realize how much of the Serbian conversation I understood.
I understood noticeably less of what the mother was saying because
she was Bosnian, but I was still shocked that understood as much as I
did.
AND. (Yes, there's
another and.) This ward is filled with one-year-olds. If nothing
else, there are tons of other families we have something in common
with—babies. Whabam. Miracles, miracles, miracles.
Money and love,
Jenna and
Amelia-bot
P.S. Amelia now
has four teeth—she sprouted two on top, though they aren't visible
in pictures yet.
P.P.S. I really appreciate comments.