6 Month Update!!!

It's been almost 6 months since the last journal entry, so I think it's about time I give everyone the 411 on how life has been since the move to California. Oh, did I forget to mention that part? Yes, I moved to California, lol.

So after Evercon last year I was really at the brink and needed a change, a huge change. Then the money situation all fell into place when taxes came back and I put in my notice at the apartment and job and prepared for the move. I had looked at a few different places to transfer to (San Diego, San Francisco, Austin, TX, and Dallas) and through a process of elimination decided that San Francisco was the best choice, despite never having been to any of the schools (or cities other than San Diego for that matter). Ultimately it came down to the fact that I wanted warm weather, liberal thinkers, a feeling of a big city, and a place I could feel comfortable being myself.

This whole period of time was uber-stressful due to the fact that I had finals for school the week I was moving and had to finish finals, pack everything, call a bunch of places to get things shut off, all while still not being sure if I even had the financial aid to have a place to live when I got out there because the school was taking it's sweet ass time getting back to me on the paperwork. I had an 8 day window between when I finished finals for classes online and had to start at the new school and the drive was supposed to take 4 days by itself. Needless to say I was on a tight schedule.

So the moving day came and I was planning on packing everything into my mini-van and driving the 2200 miles to San Francisco by myself. I was expecting to get everything packed into the van and leave by 2pm but I severely underestimated the amount of shit I have.  After all the obsessing and trying to figure out what to leave and what to take I was able to leave town at around 8:30pm. There was also supposed to be snow storms across the entire country the week I was moving out to California so I knew that the trip wasn't exactly going to be a really peachy drive out West.

I left and ended up getting caught in white-out blizzard conditions in Fond Du Lac. 

I made my way through there driving really slowly, and got to around Madison by 10:30 at night and stopped in the parking lot of a Motel 6 to sleep. It was still blizzard conditions outside and once the van had been off for a few hours I was starting to get cold. At 3:30am a cop tapped on my window to find out why I was sleeping in the parking lot of a motel and I explained the situation and he seemed to understand but it was a little tense there for a moment. The end of the next day left me in Kearney, Nebraska with 3 states under my belt. I stayed at a hotel with an indoor water park. 

So by the end of the second day I should've made it about to the end of Wyoming… that was the plan at least. As I was driving through Wyoming I made a stop in Laramie, WY of all places, for lunch. As I was driving away from the town I got above 30 miles outside the city and started to lose momentum. Going up a mountainside my van just ended up stalling. I wasn't getting any horsepower!

Lucky for me I had my GPS with me the entire trip and it was able to get the phone number of a towing company for me so I could get towed back to Laramie. When I got to the garage they threw a big stink about it and said that I wouldn't be able to get in to be looked at until the morning because I got there at ooooh! - 1 o'clock in the fucking afternoon! I went next door to pay the tow bill which came out to a lovely $440 fucking dollars for a 30 mile tow! When I got back to the garage which is surprisingly, right next door, they had already taken a look at it and told me that the transmission was completely dead (mind you they had JUST said that they couldn't even look at it until the morning like 10 minutes prior).

What this meant for me is that I had to get a hotel room for the night and try to figure out what to do. I agonized about it all night, and in the morning I ended up calling all of U-Haul places in town and the only one even had a van only had 17 foot vans, when I only needed a 10 foot. They said if I want to wait till Monday that perhaps a smaller one would come in but there was no guarantee (and this was a Tuesday when they said this). So I rented a 17 footer, drove over to the garage, unpacked all of my belongings from the mini-van into this huge ass U-Haul by myself in a snowstorm, drove over to the junkyard, sold them the title for my van, and then got the fuck out of that godforsaken state. I didn't stop driving until I was at the border of Nevada and Utah and I never looked back.

The rest of the drive was fairly uneventful but there was still drama with the whole moving-in process and the school. I managed to get to the school on the same day I was planning, albeit in much worse condition than I had planned and checked in for my housing at about 11am only to find out that there was a mandatory meeting at 6:30pm which meant I couldn't do anything about moving in until AFTER the meeting (I would have had to get that monster U-Haul from where it was parked an hour away into the city during rush hour, found parking, unloaded it, and then got it back to the U-Haul place to drop it off and gotten back to the apartment all before 6:30). We got everything unloaded at 2:00 in the morning and I drove the van to the designated drop off point only to find out that they don't HAVE a night drop off, so I just left it there and took the key with me because I had orientation at 8 AM and didn't have time to dick around with this shit.

I managed to get back to the U-Haul place after the orientation ended at 5 and get it all checked in, but then I had about 1 or 2 days before classes started, so there wasn't any kind of reprieve during this entire process.

Fucking Drama! Like I just can't get a break here.

Anyway that was about four months ago, and I have already finished one quarter in the new school here, met a few people, and kind of learned my way around parts of the city so I'm starting to adjust, sort of.

I have some cool classes this quarter, but I think my favorite class at the moment is Painting cause it's been a long time since I've had an "art" class that didn't involve 3D modeling and it's nice to just do something the old fashion way for a change.

Oh well, we'll see where this crazy season takes me…

Peace Out!
*winesoakedroses