Skipping Town

For anyone who likes video games, Andrew has an amazingly cool job. For people like us, unversed and uninvested in the world of gaming, his job is interesting from a business perspective but that’s about it. What would be extreme perks to others are simply amusing diversions for us. For example, last night Andrew brought home a Wii. We played a game of tennis, then bowled, our movements unrestricted by furniture. Andrew played a little golf and baseball. It was fun, but after about an hour, we were done with the Wii. This is what people have been paying so much money for, waiting on waitlists for? I’m missing something, apparently. Perhaps I’ll understand it a little more when Andrew brings home a Mario Brothers game, which I always liked playing on our old Nintendo system many years ago. Wii shall see.

Californians are friendly. In grocery stores, the cashiers strike up conversations, smiling and scanning my food. It’s off-putting; I’m not used to small-talk, not least because usually I’ve just spent an ungodly period of time alone in our studio apartment, out of reach of human interaction. The conversation is usually prompted when I show my driver’s license, required whenever we buy beer or wine. “You’re a long way from home,” a Trader Joe’s cashier observed recently. Or, the more common comment: “What brings you out here?” They ask how long we’ve been here, if we like it, how it’s different from back home. These questions are sometimes complicated, especially if Andrew presents his FL license. Sometimes we talk about FL as though it’s a home we’ve just left, remarking on the difference in humidity and other such chitchat. A couple of weeks ago, the cashier at the large grocery store Raley’s studied and studied my license, getting a handle on my name, which she used throughout the r...

We did it: we survived our first weekend together in suburbia. This is actually the third weekend I've spent here--once when Andrew went to a bachelor party and once when he was on a business trip--but those weekend I filled with on-my-own things, extra work and writing and renting DVDs. We faced this weekend with a kind of puzzlement. What, exactly, were we going to do all day? We'd already gone to see a movie this week--Superbad (our high expectations were disappointed); there are no museums or parks to go to; and there's nowhere to go strolling or exploring. We waited to see what would happen. Somehow, the time passed, and we managed to actually have a nice, if fully suburban, two days. Friday night, after we bought the car, we celebrated at a nice Vietnamese restaurant. Saturday, we went out for breakfast then drove into Sacramento to--finally!--return our rental car. This involved my first solo drive on the freeway, and though there was a very close call with a lane ch...

We are officially car owners. It’s crazy. Yesterday we paid, in full, in cash, for a used ’98 Volvo in excellent condition that Andrew had found listed on Craig’s List. We’ve been searching for a car for weeks now, intent on getting rid of our money-sucking rental, but nothing has been quite right: too expensive, too sketchy, an armrest that looks as though it had been chewed on regularly. We found an Audi we liked but decided against it out of fear for expensive repair work. We met a Passat seller, convinced we were going to buy it instantly, but were disappointed to see that it was definitely the worse for wear, and that the seller works at the local prison. The Volvo felt right immediately, and the sellers, a middle-aged couple who’d just bought a brand-new Lexus, had lived in both Pittsburgh and near Cornish in New Hampshire, and had a fat file folder full of painstakingly compiled information on the car’s history, inspired trust. I actually felt more wary of carrying around all th...

Seals, whales, otters—the promise of dramatic sea life was one of the things that drew us to Monterey, and our weekend did not disappoint. Saturday afternoon, when we arrived, we headed to the Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch and spotted seals sunning themselves on rocks around the harbor. We sat outside to eat—fish and chips for Andrew, clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl for me—and even saw seals swimming in the water just beneath our terrace. There were more seals, as well as large pelicans and many other birds, in view as we made the 17 Mile Drive along the coastline. The wildlife, cypresses, and dramatic sea were almost overshadowed, however, by the extravagant mansions lining much of the drive and the overwhelming abundance of ridiculously expensive cars. There is a lot of money in Monterey, and even as we ate breakfast on Sunday morning at a little café in town, we saw Lamborghinis and Porches and Ferraris drive idly by. Even a few of the cars in the parking lot of our lovely over...

This weekend, Andrew and I found ourselves once again fighting panic and existential despair at the MDPOE. A friend had flown in from Pittsburgh this weekend, preparing to relocate with his family in a few weeks, and I helped him house-hunt Friday. It’s very nice to see the occasional friend from the East Coast (more or less), but strange, too; our life here feels somehow more real when someone familiar enters it. In any case, he had booked a room at the MDPOE for Friday night, not realizing that it is a place of hellish misery; and Andrew and I, intent on cutting down our travel time for our weekend trip to Monterey, were committed to the MDPOE as well thanks to Priceline. This time, our room had 5 forks. Nate’s had 2. He also reported that his room had what appeared to be a blood stain under the window. I don’t know what it is about these places—this was actually a different branch of the MDPOE—but they are simply awful. Almost determinedly awful. Nonetheless, everyone survived the n...

Over the past week, Andrew and I have managed to acquire the following: ---TV ---DVD player ---Futon ---Daily delivery of the New York Times ---Printer ---A copy of The Rocky Road to Romance by Janet Evanovich One would think we were—at last—getting settled. And indeed, it would appear that way. The last time I had cable TV was—never. I have never subscribed to cable in all my years of living as an independent adult. In Spain, we had cable for approximately one month; but Spanish cable boxes and the television sets that accompany them are complicated to a degree unknown to the rest of humankind, and I never learned how to turn the TV on once everything was installed. This is not an exaggeration. We moved to a new apartment shortly thereafter and didn’t bother signing up again. I can’t lie: it’s nice, very nice, to have TV. I can watch Everybody Loves Raymond as I clean up dinner and watch Iron Chef America before going to sleep. On weekends like this one, when Andrew is away for wor...

It’s funny how our experience of living in CA is being sullied by the fact that we live in a suburban void. What our weekend trips have shown us over the past few weeks is that this is an incredibly beautiful state—and we are, oddly, perfectly situated to visit some of the most stunning parts of it with minimal effort and time. This weeken d, we drove a mere hour and a half and found ourselves at Lake Tahoe. The largest alpine lake in North America, Lake Tahoe is 22 miles long and 12 miles wide; the water, in some places, is 1,645 feet deep. There are 71 miles of dramatic, pine-lush shoreline. The lake is in a basin within the Sierra Nevadas, and the high altitude was palpable—walking across a parking lot was enough to make me short of breath. And the color—Lake Tahoe is an otherworldly blue, deep and rich. Set as it is against the pine forests and mountain ranges, it is a breathtaking sight. Thanks to Priceline and a strategic upgrade, we stayed the night at the luxurious Resort at Sq...

The bad news: we’re not moving back East anytime soon, so here we are in CA, which will now be our home at least through the next few months. We’re staying. Time to get a car and a bed. Time to get a TV and put the suitcases permanently away. The good news is that earlier this week was trash day in our neighborhood, so Andrew and I went foraging for furniture. We got a haul: a bookcase, a squat leather armchair, a bar cabinet complete with lock and key, and two plastic chairs for the terrace. Our apartment looks marginally more homey with our finds; once we get a bed it might actually be cozy. Yet frustrating setbacks persist. Wednesday night we tried to grill what we thought would be a delicious meal: chicken legs, eggplant, zucchini, and red peppers. It was a disaster. The vegetables either shriveled to the consistency of cardboard without, somehow, ever cooking completely through (eggplant) or barely cooked at all (zucchini). The chicken, which burnt to a crisp on the outside, was, ...