This is my third week in Pasadena. The first weeks of moving, and getting the my stuff unpacked into a studio apartment are behind me. It doesn't all fit, but my office at the church is big and so it all has a place. The internet connections are all working, that was this weeks achievement. I was getting email at the office, but couldn't send it for the first two weeks. The Apple people helped me figure how to adjust my settings so I could send email. Early this week I got connected at home. I am catching up on email.
I am busier than I was in Florida. More opportunity to get into conversations with staff and congregants. More things that have to be done. I will need to plan my time and choose what can be done now and what must be done latter. Pressure on my agenda is more acute now than it has been in years.
There was one good way to commute in Florida, I could go a different way everyday and still get back and forth in a few minutes here. It was thirty minutes driving in Florida, my commute in six minutes here unless I stop to shop on the way.
All that variety in my commute and the traveling around this place makes Pasadena and Los Angeles seem new, and varied - not overwhelming, but it is easy to get lost. I haven't really ventured out much, once to Santa Barbara (100 miles each way) and once to Rancho Palos Verdes (45 miles each way.) So Linguist Friends warning that I would burn up more gas is not coming true, yet. In Florida I was going through two tanks a week, I have used one tank a week here (shorter commute.)
I like L.A. I graduated from San Francisco State decades ago, and my family lived in the East Bay. We were drawn into the Northern California is great, Southern California is awful prejudice of the Bay area. I don't see the basis of that prejudice anymore, the Bay area has managed to sprawl all over the dry hills just as much as L.A.
I think I saw you at the PSWD workshop in Santa Barbara. I didn't get a chance to say hi. I was in the group of mystics and I suspected it was you in the "other" group. I didn't confirm it was you until I was chatting with Marguerite back in Long Beach. Hope to see you around the district again. (you commented on my Indian Bones post in August)
Well, I have been negligent in reading recent posts, but I am delighted at your positive feeling for LA so far. It is not always that way; I recall vividly one day realizing that I should go home from work because the smell of burning wood from the justified Rodney King riots was coming through the ventilating system of my medical research building. And being thrown by an earthquake off of a couch where I was sleeping at 4:31 in the morning, where a friend and I were keeping an eye on a bunch of homeless people in the basement of a UU church that could never be used again (Canoga Park). And, and. But you need to get out to the Huntington Museum, and to Cliff's Bookstore on East Colorado, etc. (about two blocks' walk from your church). I had no idea that you were able to find a place so near to the church as to be a six-minutes' drive - that is wonderful. When you visit in San Diego, you will burn gas, but it sounds like you have saved on the commuting part of it.
LinguistFriend