october 2006
october 31 2006 7:57 pst frost on the grass this morning. no idea what the temp is, but i'm betting right now it's below 30 when i head off to class in 20 minutes.
october 30 2006 13:46 pst today it was 35 degrees at 10 am. hooray for the time change- but it's officially cold now.
october 28 2006 11:58 pdt we gave in and turned the heat on last night. yesterday on the way to class, i got the audi snowflake for the first time...
october 25 2006 23:41 pdt stupid airlines. plane tickets home for christmas are $700. not even kayak can help us now.
everyone talks about how places like eugene have a 'lower cost of living,' and use it to justify lower salaries. i'm here to tell you that it's a bunch of bs. utilities cost basically the same. cable tv is even more egregiously expenisve here- we don't have it, but we looked at getting our internet that way, and ruled it out becuase they wanted like $60/month for just the internet service. everything in the house is electric, so there's no natural gas... but that means that the electric bill is high, and we haven't turned the heat on yet. tonight the temperature is 42 degrees outside, and it's only october.
gas is still $2.50/gallon. bread and milk cost the same that they did in california. a pint of beer in a restaurant is still $4.50, plus or minus a buck depending on where you are and whether you order pabst or some fancy micro. stuff at costco is essentially the exact same price. sure there's no sales tax, but if all you buy is groceries, there's no sales tax in cali either. it costs $300 more here than it did in san francisco to fly to anywhere i might want to go. the worst flaw in the 'lower cost of living' argument is that not only do high-quality or unique goods still cost exactly the same price (if not more), they're harder to get becuase fewer places sell them (thus the higher prices, because there's less competition). the closest audi dealer is 85 miles away. so really, the only way you can claim that the cost of living is lower is if you don't actually, you know, bother to live at all. if we ever want to buy something nice, or go on a vacation somewhere, it's going to cost us a higher percentage of our salary to do it here than it would in sf, because hawaii doesn't care about your lower cost of living, and 5 nights in hana cost the same amount of dollars no matter where you're coming from.
this is all kind of moot, because it's not like i'm actually earning a salary, or like we're spending a whole lot of money on anything except the mortgage and necessities. thinking about christmas this year just makes it seem much more immediate.
october 23 2006 22:04 pdt your krs-one wisdom for this tuesday: today, is the tomorrow, you should have feared yesterday. i think you should think about the beef you got, and confront your enemy before it gets too hot.
october 22 2006 20:15 pdt last weekend it was cold and rainy for a day. cold like 50 degrees. today, sunny and 70 again. the cat is all curled up at my feet. i spilled coffee all over the carpet in the bedroom yesterday, so my first goal this week is to see if there is some way we can get that fixed before it becomes permanent.
october 12 2006 18:38 pdt in case anyone was wondering, it was sunny and 70 again here today. and real estate prices... well, they aren't TOTALLY unreasonable. i just hope the weather holds for the football game this weekend.
october 10 2006 22:01 pdt i posted some older photos to flickr today, in no particular order. they span almost four years of personal digital photography, beginning before anyone had ever heard of flickr and ending about a month ago. there are a bunch more photos on my camera right now, but i realized the other night that there are years of pictures sitting on my pc that nobody has seen... so i thought it might be worthwhile to try to correct that.
october 8 2006 21:54 pdt back from the bay area. 4 weeks to the election! if i can make it through the next 2 weeks without getting sick, i'm starting to think that i might actually be able to pull this off.
ok, i just read that paragraph again, and it was totally confusing becuase none of those sentences relate to each other at all. i'm physically back from the bay area. my dad is running for judge, and that election is the same day as the general elections across the country- tuesday, november 7th. i am not personally running for any elected office at this time. and as for pulling anything off or not, i'm talking about school. still not proper english really, but hopefully less confusing.
it's been sunny up here while we were gone. i for one am ready for the rain to finally start. everyone has been telling us how much it rains here- we've seen maybe two or three days of weather since we moved here. i'm beginning to think that it's some kind of reverse p.r. campaign engineered specifically to keep out the californians.
