Eight-hour drive.
San Diego Zoo. Balboa Park. La Jolla Cove.
Legoland Adventures. Seaside Village Restaurant.
Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific. Santa Monica Beach, Promenade. C and O Trattoria. Korean charcoal BBQ. Getty Center. New Little Taipei with its boba milk teas and $12 three-dish meals.
Pictures to come.
After a few years of dormancy, I seem to have forgotten the pain associated with house hunting. I’m looking for a place to rent with a few friends - deciding that I have no desire to be abused by the Bay Area real estate market - but it’s turning out to be quite an involved and stressful task. You would think that, given the sizable amounts of money involved and being of one life’s basic necessities, that tools would’ve been created to make the process go smoothly and painlessly; it’s a bit sad that Craigslist housing classifieds remain the best resource for prospective tenants…like it was 3 years ago when I first moved down to the Peninsula…like it was 6 years ago when I moved out of the Berkeley dorms.
House hunting has got to be one of the least efficient endeavors one can undertake: landlords list their rental properties, renters set up a meeting to view the property, forms are filled out and faxed back to the landlord, credit checks are run, worthiness of the tenant is determined, and other forms are filled and signed to finally close the deal. Oh, and expect to repeat, probably ten or more times, before the stars align and an agreement is reached or the tenant gives up looking and secures the convenient services of a cardboard box and a highway overpass.
Just a quickie entry before I dive into the happy world of tax forms and W-2 crunching. This is a pretty good documentary on the state of credit cards in America and how the words “credit card nation” mean what they do today.
Frontline: Secret History of the Credit Card
It’s quite educational, and in this corporate-run-amok world of credit debt and revolving interest, it certainly pays to keep informed.