California

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.