Things continue to be busy for Ron and me (hence the dearth of blog postings).
Ron started a job at Yahoo! in Santa Monica as a front-end engineer. (He LOVES it)
And I am content so far with my job as a Development Scientist at Beckman-Coulter.

As the title of this post indicates ….we are moving *again* to be closer to Ron’s new job.
Our future residence (as of tomorrow, 18 Feb 2007) will be:

12314 Montana Ave
Apt. 6
Los Angeles CA 90049

That’s Brentwood, …about 1 mile from Ron’s job in Santa Monica.

We are both excited about the move and expect to enjoy our new neighborhood.
We will be actually in LA (rather than the suburbs) which of course has both advantages and disadvantages…but we expect to enjoy the proximity to the beach and to the LA/city-action.

Please keep in touch with us and come to visit!
Our new place is ideally located for entertaining out-of-town guests.

So it’s been almost two months since we arrived in SoCal and a lot has happened. Mary and Hyun and Hanel were great to us and we ended up imposing on their hospitality longer than I had expected. Six Weeks. They were wonderful and we were really comfortable there, but we were starting to get nervous about when we would ever find our own place. We were waiting for me to get a job, and that turned out to take longer than expected. I had a pretty intense interview with AMGEN. I was there all day long and talked to thirteen different people. I thought it went well, and everybody seemed to encourage my belief that I was likely to get the job..but after that I heard nothing for week after week. I also had an interview with Beckman-Coulter, and they also made me feel very positive about the possibility of getting an offer, but also kept me waiting for weeks. I was beginning to freak out and was submitting cover-letters and resumes like crazy, in case I didn’t get offered either of them. Finally I got an offer from Beckman-Coulter and after several phone calls to Amgen, was informed that that position had been offered to someone else. I was actually relieved because then I didn’t have to decide between them. I thought the BC job would be much more interesting and fun than the one at Amgen, but the facilities, benefits and pay at Amgen are legendary, so it would have been a tough decision. Ron and I set about searching for apartments which were close to my work and settled into a comfortable apartment in Brea, CA. It’s northern Orange County, and inland, which was not what we imagined when we moved to LA, but we like our place, and I can ride my bike to work (yay!) and avoid the horrendous LA commute. We borrowed a bed and desk from Mary until we were able to buy our own furniture (at IKEA naturally). And we got our refrigerator. YES LA must be the only place in the country where you rent an apartment WITHOUT a refrigerator and you have to procure one on your own. Who wants to add a 300lb appliance to the rest of the crap you need to move when you are a renter? Grrrr.
I have been at work for two weeks now, and although they are not paying me as much as I had expected to get I think I’m going to really like my job. Everybody there is REALLY nice and easy-going and easy to get along with and work with. I’m going to be helping them to develop applications for their nucleic acid testing line of instruments. I understand that it’s going to mean a lot of publishing and travelling to conferences. I think it’s going to be fun. Plus I get to help out with the actual instrument design, …collaborate with the engineers and software engineers to help make the instuments work better and make them user-friendly. That’s fun. It’s great after so many years of academia to be in a job where you can actually see how your own work contributes to the creation of a product. I can see myself really being happy with my job. There are a bunch of other crazy things going on, but we’ll save that for another time.

Here’s our new info:

2540 Country Hills Road #183
Brea CA 92821
(714) 256-4530

Drop a line or give us a call!!

We had stayed in a hotel outside of Tucson and got ourselves up and out of there pretty early to head up to Arcosanti. It’s some weird achitect’s vision in the desert….always under construction and inhabited by artists and transients. From there we took a southwest course through Prescott Az, back to the I-10. The scenery along this road was absolutely amazing. . We had planned to stay the night in Joshua Tree, but when we arrived we discovered that the campsites were all full. Being within a few hours of Mary’s place by this point, we decided to bring our journey to a close and just head on in to town.

We awoke and packed up our tent, then took a brief hike in the park. The desert landscape is so foreign to us and it was really incredible and amazing. We saw a bunch of lizards and some birds. When we left we asked one of the rangers where we could get a bite to eat. He recommended the salt flat cafe. Well, I don’t know if it was a recommendation as much as the only thing around, but it was delicious. It appeared to be pretty much a one-woman operation. Shirley took our order, then disappeared into the kitchen to cook our food, brought it to us, cleaned up the table and took our money at the register. I started talking with her and she informed us that she’s the owner, that the ranch on which the restaurant sits has been in her family for over 100 years, that they opened the restaurant about fifty years ago, and that she’s been working there since she was a child. The tamales were REALLY good. I highly recommend stopping in if you find yourself on this stretch of road. We continued on through San Antonio and into Tucson. When we passed through San Antonio we got a little turned-around and had a hell of a time getting back on course. We just kept driving around and around that place. The kids were demonstrating about the anti-immigrant legislation, but we didn’t know that and were freaking out about it. I was thinking “What the hell kind of parade is this?!?” The kids were hiking around the city, …everywhere….even on the freeways…and appeared to be getting completely cooked in the heat. They were just trudging along silently and looking really really hot and miserable. I didn’t see any signs or flags or anything to indicate what they were doing out there, and I was feeling really sorry for them. I thought that it was something that had been imposed upon them by their school for some inexplicable reason. (We figured it out eventually.) We continued on to Tucson and stayed the night in a hotel there. The drive across Soutwest New Mexico was stunning. We saw a bunch of dust storms and tumbleweeds and were nearly blown off the road a couple of times. The landscape is so desolate and beautiful at the same time: cliffs, rocks,cacti and sun sun sun.

We left our hotel in Kady, TX and headed for San Antonio. We met up with my aunt for lunch there. She happened to be there on business so we arraged to get together. She had business meetings and so was a little pressed for time, so we were extra-grateful that she worked-us into her schedule. We had a great lunch at a hotel restaurant on the riverwalk. Unfortunately, my aunt had to hurry back to her meetings and left Ron and me to finish our lunch without her. San Antonio has this really nice “river walk” which is more like a system of canals. They’ve got restaurants and bars lining both sides and ferry boats that cruise up and down, and really lovely landscaping. It’s really pretty nice. Ron especially liked it. We checked out the Alamo and then had a coctail at one of the many river-walk restaurants. We then continued on to the Guadalupe National Park. We arrived after dark and set up our tent in one of the campsites. It was a really lovely evening and we had an incredibly clear and bright crescent moon which allowed us to make camp without flashlights.

Brad gave us a brief driving tour of the New Orleans destruction. We didn’t go all the way into the ninth ward but what we saw was enough. Abandoned cars and buildings, water marks on the siding of second stories of houses, and the spray-painted notices of health inspectors. It’s pretty impressive. The French Quarter didn’t seem to be too damaged. Brad dropped us off and we walked around for a while. We did go to Cafe du Monde. Ron said that it had the dirtiest bathroom he’s ever seen. The Cafe au lait was good, but there wasn’t much of a French ambiance as all of the servers were chinese. We took the ferry back to Brad and Helena’s and after thanking our hosts and packing up our things took off for Texas. The traffic was really bad for some reason and we made slow progress. Just as we entered Texas we stopped at the rest stop and were swarmed by mosquitos. They were slow and small by Maine standards, but WOW were they abundant. We hadn’t encountered really any mosquitos at all until then, and really none after, so we were both wondering what the hell was the deal with that mosquito infested patch of Texas. Houston was so weird to drive through at night. They have a bunch of industry….oil refineries, I assumed…all lit up and industrial-looking ….for miles. It gave the place a very surreal Mad-Max look. The smell contributed to the post-apocalyptic feeling of the place.

When we left the hotel in the morning this homeless guy asked us for some food. He came shuffling over calling “Excuse me! I’m real hungry and I could use something to eat, ….but not nothin’ sweet….I got stomach problems and I don’t need the sweet…nothing like no candy or that kinda junk food or nothin’…I need something kinda…something I can snack on….something like….THAT!” This is where he points to a gigantic bag of oriental snack mix (that stuff with rice crackers and wasabi peas) that was on the front seat of the car. My parents really like that stuff so they gave us a giant Costco-sized bag of it -which had to share the front seat with me since the car was so full. This guy was leaning over the car and pointing at this bag and telling us “Yeah. That’s what I want”….like we’re working behind the deli-counter or something. Like he’s a grocery store customer tapping on the glass saying “I’ll have a pound of this ham here, no not the honey-glazed, this one here” tap tap tapping on our windshield. “Yeah, that’s what I want”. We gave it to him and watched him shuffle off with this like 10 pound bag of snack mix. It just seemed really absurd. Other less successful negotiators had tactics such as “HEY! Gimme five dollars! You got ten dollars? How about fifteen?!” (what?!) And one offered to escort us to Beale Street (the corner) for $5.
So off to Graceland. I never understood the appeal of a trip to Graceland -but I gained a slight appreciation for it after having gone because it made me realize that Elvis….was BIG. I mean, I knew that he was famous, I knew that everybody knew who Elvis was, and that he’s regularly impersonated and that as a kid I could not enjoy seven minutes of daytime TV without enduring five minutes of Elvis call-now-and-order-cassette-or-8-track- only-$9.99 commercials. My sister and I used to punch him in his bloated sweaty sideburned face when it came on the TV-we were so sick of those commercials. But Graceland made me understand. That guy was WAY more famous than probably anything. That is what makes him so darn fascinating -the fact the he was SO famous. Ron liked the TV room.
The BEST thing in Memphis was the A&R Bar-B-Que where we headed for lunch after our Graceland tour. (Thank You Linds!) Really nice place, really nice people, and REALLY REALLY good barbeque.
We drove away from Memphis happy and full and thinking maybe it wasn’t such a bad place after all.
From there we went to New Orleans to see my cousin and his wife. We arrived kinda late and strolled down to a local restaurant. My cousin and his wife and her daughter have this great house in a really neat neighborhood. They treated us to a great dinner. I love the New Orleans ambiance. It’s such an interesting combination of French and Voodoo and Alligators-all these disparate sensations mixed together. By the way, my cousins wife is an amazing calligrapher. She’s got a business out of her home writing invitations and the like. Check it out here.

Back on the road again. Ron and I headed south towards Memphis, and stopped on the way at Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. The longest network of caves in the world (or something like that). I had been there several times as a kid, but this was Ron’s first time in a cave. He was pretty excited about it. We had hoped to be able to take the “wild cave” tour, where they make you crawl around on your belly and get muddy and stuff, but we ended up on some cattle-call tour where they shuttle about 120 people through the well-lit and locker-room stuffy (from the 120 x 10 people who had taken the tour already that day) cave-freeway. Still interesting, but we’d both like to do a little more exploring next time we visit a cave. After our tour we drove right past Nashville, which I had sorta wanted to visit-but maybe another time-, and on into Memphis. What a disappointment that place is. We had homeless people encircling our car as we pulled in. Memphis -to the casual observer- is gross. The first hotel we checked into had a really unpleasant odor and our room didn’t appear to be very clean so we decided to try another one. The staff of the hotel were nice and they didn’t have a problem giving us our money back, but it was not until we checked into the next hotel that I understood that the first hotel wasn’t too bad, apparently. We ambled over to Beale Street to see what was happening, which was nothing, and then went back home, deflecting beggars on both sides. I couldn’t wait to get out of that town. But of course….we couldn’t leave without visiting Graceland (so everybody says).

Kicked around the hometown this day and spent a little more time with the folks. My Dad set off the smoke alarms preparing what was probably the most delicious steak ever. Mmmmmm.

After lounging around with Rich Heather and Ethan for a while in the morning, we said goodbye to our gracious hosts and headed for Columbus, Ohio. We enjoyed a brief but great visit with Christine and Jen and David and met Bella for the first time. We had to zip on down to my folk’s in Cincinnati so we could get to the Symphony on time. The Cincinnati Symphony is pretty good, and I used to like going there. My parents got some tickets for us and we all really enjoyed it. I don’t even remember what we heard…and…no…Ron doesn’t either, but we liked it and we had a good time.