Joel's Blog

Joel has a blog now too. www.ackermanifestdestiny.blogspot.com

19 Days

We've been here 19 days and it's slowly getting better. The good news is we saw a coyote in the neighborhood next to us and at the international marketplace the pitas are 40 cents a package. I've had a couple job interviews, and got one of them, but the others weren't just summer jobs and the schedule didn't work for the fall, so I didn't get them. And I'm going to try to get us tickets to Jeopardy.

New Look

What do you think? Joel says he loves me even though I'm a peace loving hippie and he's a war-mongering Republican. I'm not too sure those are mutually exclusive.

The Beginning

We've been living in LA for one 11 days. I hated it at first, and I mean really hated it. It's so big and crowded and it seems like EVERYBODY is having an awful day. It's hot but because of the pollution, I'm assuming, it's smoggy and weird. Our apartment is small and expensive and every time I go to the grocery store I feel like everyone is staring at me. The first couple days we were selling Orabrushes to Wal-Marts across southern California but that turned out to be a nightmare. Trying to sell tongue brushes to busy and angry people all day is not my idea of a good time. So after the three days we decided to give ourselves as a trial period we didn't feel bad about giving up. Then Joel left to go back to Utah for three days to finish up some work he had. Back when we found out he had to go he suggested we buy me a plane ticket too so I could come with him, but being the financially minded person I'm turning into (thanks Dad) I thought it would be a waste of money. Turns out it would have been a waste of money but it also would have been better than me being all by my lonesome for three whole days. Normally it wouldn't be a big deal. In Provo if I was left alone for a couple days I would hang out with my friends or go to Kelsey's house when I wasn't working. But here, here I have nothing. I have no friends, I have no family, no job, and there is no one to spend time with. I would have had the internet and my artificial relationships via Facebook but it wasn't set up yet, so I didn't even have that. I had my phone and spent a lot of time on it talking to Joel and various family members who were probably concerned about my sanity (thank you family members).

But the good news is that was last week. I decided I didn't like last week and I didn't want to have any more weeks like it. Making sure some of those things didn't happen was easy. I decided Joel is never going to leave me for more than 23.5 hours again in our lives. We both decided, as stated above, we weren't going to spend one more minute in Wal-Mart ever again either. I decided I was going to start right away looking for a job so I have something to do with my time, feel productive, have more money, etc. We cleaned and organized the apartment so we feel like real people. And we decided to spend more time familiarizing ourselves with our surroundings so I don't hate it so much. We found a park just 7 minutes away on foot. We found the LA River, which consists of a huge concrete ravine going under the bridge with a tiny tiny trickle of water, nevertheless it is called the LA River. We found the public library, the laundromat where Joel will work, a grocery store full of people who DON'T stare at me, and the temple. On top of that I had two job interviews today. It's still uncomfortably hot and weird outside and the people here are generally unfriendly but maybe I'll eventually become unfriendly and angry too and fit right in.