“Smart women don’t turn me on but dumb girls turn me off”
-Boeckman

So tomorrow at 9am, I start work officially. And of course I’ve been working on freelance projects since I’ve been here, but I’m talking sit-down-from-9-5-type-job.

I gotta admit, I’m a bit nervous.

I guess I shouldn’t be– it’s coding xhtml/css/jscript, which I’m okay with doing… but I guess it’s what they call the ‘intangibles’ that I’m slightly trepidatious about. Things like,”Will my co-workers like me? What will they think of my coding and work? I hope I don’t smell bad. What do I wear??” You know, the really important issues. Back at Element Fusion, I think that was the best part of my day– I genuinely cared for pretty much everyone who worked there– it was more like a family than any company I’d ever worked for, and I’ll truly miss it.

But as for tomorrow, I guess all I can do is keep coding like I have, wear ironed clothes, and make sure to remember the deodorant.

Another thing that’s been trying to say the least is finding an apartment. I finally found a town, Alhambra, which seems to be idyllic. It reminds me a lot of Norman and has much more of a small-town feel than does the rest of Los Angeles. It’s about 30 minutes northeast of LA, which is probably why the apartments are cheaper, but the one thing I don’t understand about 95% of the apartments around here is that they don’t have refrigerators.

Let me repeat– they don’t have refrigerators.

HOW does that make any sense? Apparently at some point (according to one landlord) people decided that they wanted to keep their own fridges and not have the ones already installed in the apartments, so the landlords had to have them taken out. Now, people (apparently) just move from place to place hauling their huge fridges around. Wtf?? On top of that, parking is ridiculous too. Many places don’t have dedicated parking so you have to park in the street, which means parallel parking with 80 other people, and then buying a permit from the city each year so that you don’t get a ticket. Grr. Personally it sounds like a scam, but I also don’t have much of a choice.

Anyway… so that’s that for now. I’m off to iron my clothes and take a shower to get ready for the big day.

I was offered and had accepted a job last Friday, which I was very excited about, but there were some steps to get through– namely, a background check and some other paperwork. I was getting worried though, because today is Friday and I’m supposed to start on Monday and I still hadn’t heard anything.

Waiting is quite difficult.

And then today, I got the call. I’m all set for Monday at 9 am with Kaiser Permanente. I’ll be a web developer for them, which I’m very excited about. The people that I met seemed really cool and chill, and I’m looking forward to really getting my hands dirty working on different projects.

I guess it’s something you realize– when you want something SO BAD.. SO BAD… and you just are told, “Wait,” it’s the hardest thing. Then on top of that I’ve run into a bunch of other bad luck over the course of this week (a fender bender, hospital bills from an ER visit, etc.), I was really starting to get shaken in my faith. But I tried my best to stay strong. Today, I read the Bible and I read a book by Max Lucado that my mom had given me before I left Oklahoma. Both passages matched up (and I just pick verses and pages randomly)– they both told me God was telling me to be patient.

And once you do, once you realize that there’s nothing that is truly in your hands, but only in His…

things get better.

Have a great weekend, everybody.