Break on through

Well, you can plan down to every last detail for the transportation of yourself, two parents, three cats, and 250+ lbs of luggage (not to mention the shipping of 5 boxes of books and 8 boxes of necessary objets and also one heavy bicycle) across the country, with airport sedans, parking, multiple rental cars, and perfectly timed appointments with rental agents all coming together just as hoped, but what you can't plan for is arriving during a massive heat wave at the end of the summer and the beginning of a holiday weekend at a point when most stores are sold out of fans and your apartment does not have air conditioning as you so foolishly thought it did and everything you shlepped for thousands of miles needs to be transported up the stairs and into the new place. It was 106 degrees here yesterday! And 100 the day before that! Sleeping on plasticky air mattresses did not help matters, but wearing a fur coat seems to have been much worse -- some of us only recently uncurled from emergency positions adjacent to the bottom of the toilet. I'm so tired I don't even have the energy to check my voicemail, even though it is filled with messages from people I want to talk to. I'm just glad we made it through alive, really.

Also, it is very, very weird here. Not Spookytown weird, but entirely different. For example, after dropping off the folks at the airport I headed to the beach for 4 hours of rest time (good for the soul; bad for the back of the legs which apparently *do* need sunblock in the middle of the day in Southern California) and fell asleep after my swim and woke up to find myself literally surrounded by cast and crew of some reality show for some network or other. One of the "stars" was chatting with two vain surfers to my left, one of whom had been extensively examining his (admittedly quite nice) abs for quite some time as I was falling asleep, and exclaimed, "Dude, I hope I'm still out there on my board when I'm as old as you. 40. Wow." Meanwhile, his co-star was repeatedly skipping towards the camera as yet another co-star repeatedly tossed a small blue frisbee just behind her head. They were all maybe 19, and trendy/tacky and scantily clad (well, the boys wearing trucker caps but very tight jeans), while the crew had a surprising number of large, rather dykey Hispanic women, and the director had plopped down right next to me and was murmuring directions into her headset even though everyone was maybe five feet away at most. And they kept on spraying sand on my legs as they ran about. I'm not sure, but I think my dorsal zone made it into some of the shots while I was sleeping. God, I hope not...