Everything Else

when i haven’t been busy loving on the house, working on the house or living in the house, i’ve been doing other stuff. not much other stuff, though, as the house remains the centerpiece of most waking moments. but when it’s not, i’ve been spending time doing much exploring of my new neighborhood, which i’ll get to at a later post and which entails the eating of much mexican food. it also entails getting lost constantly and following streets until they dead-end into hillsides — a common feature in highland park. then there’s the trips to ikea, home depot, lowes, Micky Mouse Hardware, and there i go talking about the house again. let me try to stay focused with some bullet points:

• i saw Duran Duran in concert a few weeks ago, which made me very, very happy since i loves me some Hungry Like the Wolf. i’ve seen them before, numerous times in fact and, as always, their performance was beyond superb and made me scream like the 14-year-old girl i truly am inside. but unlike the 14-year-old girl i used to be, who would spend hours by the backstage door hoping to catch a glimpse of my soul mate, bassist john taylor, i went home right after the sunday-night show, humming New Moon on Monday during the drive home.
  


• i took the Gold Line to work the other week — and was probably a little too excited by it. it was an exhilarating experience, one i never thought i’d have in this fair city of mine, where car culture is the only culture outside of the yogurt. but there i was making the 10-minute drive to the train station, where i parked my car and hopped aboard the choo-choo — dumb smile on my face, my love for los angeles overflowing — and sat among the other commuters navigating their way into downtown LA for the workday. one trip did the trick, so starting in july i’ll be going metro to work three out of five days. this means a company-paid metro card, the $50/month parking fee my work charges waived, and savings galore on gas.
  


• speaking of work, i’m starting a new job at my company in july. i’m not sure what i can say about it here other than it’s different from the work i’ve been doing as a financial editor, though not entirely different. i’ll still be making edits to copy, but whereas before when i would review copy and then send it to my company’s Compliance department for rubber-stamping, i’ll now be on the Compliance side doing the rubber-stamping. the job is rooted in the legal department and will have me interpreting all sorts of sexy FINRA guidelines, like how regulatory disclosures should be presented in sales materials. HOT!
  


• i spent a few days in beautiful El Segundo taking a course on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which are complicated as a mother fucker to learn. the course was the complement to the HTML course i took last year in Costa Mesa, which was also complicated. i’m sure it could all make sense with a little practice, maybe a lot of practice, but three days of having the nuances of a programming language thrown at me overwhelmed me enough to conclude that i am just too stupid to learn this stuff.
  


• i saw the SATC movie, which i enjoyed immensely as it felt like a long, new episode of the show and was made better by the fact that i caught one of the SATC T-shirts the ushers threw into the crowd before the film started. i got some serious mad-dog glares from the girls surrounding me when i nabbed it and worried that those bitches would jump me in the parking lot after the show, but they kept their distance after i told them that i knew kung fu. (i don’t know kung fu.) the shirt reads “I ♥ New York,” which is funny because i don’t ♥ New York all that much. i ♥ LA infinitely more, especially after that train ride.