Life have been extremely busy of late. From about the end of July to now I’ve been doing 60-80 hour weeks. My paycheck loves it but I’m starting to wear a bit. I knew it was going to be like this and it will likely continue to the end of the year. In a lot of ways, this is great! It means I’ll be happily employed for a while yet (and to be honest, I don’t expect that to change but with the economy as it’s going, anything is possible). In other news K got a job (finally!) in her field. After nearly a year and half (with over 1,000 applications and only 2 interviews) she got a call back for a temp position in the VA. I suspect that she’ll be there longer than the 2-3 months they initially said it would be (they keep giving her more cases) so that’s good. Even better, she’s really happy about all that.
On a lark yesterday, we went to the Open House that the place next door was showing. It was perfect! 3 bedroom (or rather 1 bedroom, 2 offices or 1 bedroom, 1 office and maybe 1 nursery?), had a nice backyard (for the puglettes), a 2nd floor large balcony, granite counter tops, new appliances and a center aisle kitchen workspace. The biggest downside was lack of A/C. And that’s a deal breaker in L.A. Although where we live is actually very temperate there can be weeks where it gets regularly above 100F. The other downside was price: $600K. We could do it but I’m hesitant until the green card is done. And once we’re confident that K’s job is perm, I think we’ll look into it. I don’t know that $600K is achievable. I’ve always thought that $250-300K would be more appropriate but who knows? With rates so low it may be a good time for us to lock into a long term mortgage. One of my long term dreams was to have a house. Not for financial reasons but for permanence and to settle down.
Needless to say, the house next door definitely fit into what we were dreaming of as a house. It would need a little work (and some major heavy duty cleaning! I could tell where they tried to hide it) but it’s something that could easily be done. More importantly, is that we’d be able to stay in a community that we like and we could get to know more of it.
In other news, apparently the Health Insurance company is claiming that my surgery isn’t coverable (even though their own policy says that it can). I think they deliberately make it hard to obtain coverage. So to help me with this I enabled help from CKlife.org to get through the red tape of health insurance. I think one of the biggest challenges in the US (that I’ve faced) is the overwhelming amount of red tape that everything has, from taxes to health care. The fact that, as an intelligent adult, I need help to navigate all this crap is incredible. I suppose that is how one keeps a large population at work — by tracking things via paperwork (and it’s mostly paperwork; it’s surprising how many do not have good online account systems). But I still find it all frustrating. I am still recovering to a degree and have decided to postpone my planned trip from Vancouver, B.C. to Los Angeles next year to the year after. So it’s now a goal of 2013 rather than 2012.
That should give me enough time to get back into shape (other than round) and get back to fully vegan. I’ve been gradually moving back to it. Watching and reading about the whys reminded me why I so much did it in the past. Sometimes we need that before we can get back to where we were. At this point, I’ve gotten to about 95% vegan with some vegetarian meals here and there (I’m trying to empty the fridge of stuff without having to toss it). I was also considering a gym membership with maybe a trainer (it’s a UFC gym) but perhaps what I need is just the trainer bit. I don’t think I need a gym since my body is weight enough and if I do the exercises right, I can use that. I just need to figure out where in my schedule I should put this. It may be a matter of scheduling 30-60 min a day just so I can have that time to do exercise. I am, at least, walking the dogs early in the morning before work starts. I may need to get up a little earlier to do the weight stuff and then do the dog walk afterwards. Hrmm…
Hi Linus, I saw your post on the Chaz Forum. I saw that you were looking for support with being vegan/vegetarian. I wrote a detailed list of books etc. that may help.
Good Luck!
– J
you’re awesome, keep going
Don’t mind them at all. It’s just a small piece of crap wanting to get into the bigger picture of things. I have been a fan of yours way back then and I don’t see any of that coming.
Gary Keeling