rew | ff

Friday, March 12, 2004

Didn't do a whole lot today, although I did find out that there's an opening at Sean's work. So I applied, basically. Sean and Dane both did well on their end-of-phase tests, and today's what they call "end-of-phase friday." It means we're going out drinking tonight. EDIT: Oh yeah, we went out drinkin'. To an Irish pub called "The Dubliner" in a strip mall in what I beleive was east Phoenix? On the way home, we got lost, becasue they closed the freeway (?!?) for no apparent reason; according to Sean, this is normal. Our neighbor Katie insisted on staying at our place because her power is out, for the second night in a row. To say she made herself at home would be an understatement.

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Thursday, March 11, 2004

Today was the first day that I really don't have anything in particular I have to do. That, coupled with the fact that the cable guy came by this morning and hooked up our DSL service, allowed me to spend the rest of the day making this blog. I figure I won't have too many more days like this that I can sit around, interneting my ass off, with no job and no school to worry about. Hopefully Sean and Dane and I will be good about keeping up on this log, and hopefully someone other than us will enjoy it. Please excuse any problems you may find; I'm no HTML expert and am writing this in straight code on simpletext. Have mercy!

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Wednesday we woke up late and had to rush to get Sean to work on time, which was no problem at all given the way people here drive. Sean describes Phoenix as being the last of the Wild West, with basic lawlessness and chaos running rampant. Rarely do people drive less than 10 or 20 miles over the speed limit. It's the most vulnerable I've ever felt to traffic accidents (with good reason, as it turned out), and I lived in New York City. There as a story on the TV news the other night about an elderly couple who had been killed by a truck while trying to cross a major street in the middle of the night. The amazing thing about the story was that everyone obviously took it for granted that it had been a (successfull) suicide attempt by the couple. With the way people drive here, the wife pushing the husband in his wheelchair across the street after dark was clearly suicidal. The driver will not be charged.

And, sure enough, after jokingly refering to the many car wrecks I'm going to get into here in an email to an ex-girlfriend, I got into my first ever car accident when on my way to pick Sean up from class. A guy driving a Ford minivan blew a red light as I was turning left onto the freeway with the light (there may be nothing more dangerous in Phoenix than left turns). I glanced up and saw a pair of headlights heading directly at me, jumped on the brakes, locked them up and skidded straight into what turned out to be little more than a head-on bumper tap. No real damage to either car, certainly no injuries, but had I been a bit slower on the brakes, Sean's car would have been seriously fucked up. I don't think there was any way either of us were gonig to be serious hurt (when I hit the brakes I think I was doing about 30mph), but not having a car would have been a real problem here, especially for Sean. The way things are set up here, you absolutely have to have a car to get around, and with Sean's schedule of 6 hours of work, 45 minutes commuting / free time, and then 6 hours of school, things would have been seriously problematic.

However, on the bright side, I got an interview at a local Starbucks (which, thank God, I'd be able to walk to and keep my ass off the roads) on Monday, and Dad found a relatively cheap way to ship my car down next week. Oh yeah, and today was "Orientation" at the school. More than I really want to type, but I think I can sum it up with a question that was asked of the guy telling us about the manufacturer-specific graduate programs (such as BMW STEP, which we're all hoping to get into) - "Uh, if I got a DUI before I had my driver's license, does it count against my record?"

Tuesday, March 9, 2004

Tuesday Dane and I managed to move almost the entire contents of he and Sean's 1-bedroom apartment to our new 2-bedroom, sign the lease, etc. Actually, that might have happened on Monday; it's all kind of a blur at this point. We also discovered that our apartment building has free gym memberships to the LA Fitness next door, which was great news to everyone but Sean, who had already bought a membership there at a cost of about $30 a month. Anyway, having the use of Sean's car for the day, I went around applying for jobs, one of which was near Tempe and caused me to get stuck in 90 degree rush hour traffic, which added Phoenix freeways to several new lists in my head. I also happened by a dilapidated car lot / junkyard that was full of classic, or just old, cars. I stopped, of course, and immediately noticed two 1963 Lincoln Continentals among the junkers. This is significant because I am in Arizona, and cars simply don't rust. My '61 Lincoln has a rusty trunk lid, which is insanely hard to find a replacement for. Either of those '63s, while not an exact match, would work fine on my car. I take this as a good sign that the junkyards here are going to totally kick ass. If that seems like an oxymoronic statement to you, you are clearly someone other than my friend Ken.

Monday, March 8, 2004

Today Sean and Dane had to go to School or, in Sean's case, work and then school. Sean works for a living. The only problem with this was that now I'm here, and I needed a way to get to the school at 8am for check-in, when neither Sean's nor Dane's classes start until 2pm. The obvious solution of me driving Sean to work at 7am in his car, then returning later to pick him up and take him to school, thus providing me with lots of time to have the car to myself, did not occur to us until Tuesday. So I ended up getting a ride to school on the back of Dane's motorcycle, which was quickly added to not only the "Stuff I didn't think of when deciding to move to Phoenix that I now wish I had" list, but also the "Things I am mortally afraid of" list. Phoenix traffic in general was rapidly beginning to frighten me.

I did not have my car down in Phoenix with me yet. I had been frantically putting the car, a 1969 BMW 2002, back together in the weeks before my departure from Portland, and while all my crazy modifications turned out to work (Vovlo electronic fuel injection, BMW electronic ignition, BMW 5-series leather interior, and more), I was only able to put about 50 miles on the just-rebuilt engine by the time I had to leave. Not wanting to break in the engine on the freeway, I decdied to fly instead, and either sell the car or have it shipped down eventually.

Sunday, March 7, 2004

This was my first full day in Phoenix. My flight from Portland got in at 2pm on Saturday, Sean and Dane picked me up at the airport, and we immediately got semi-lost in Tempe, accidentally driving through the ASU campus. Just driving through made me appreciate Hampshire. I mean, I like miniskirts and tube tops as much as the next guy, but when everyone you see on the street is dressed like it's Spring Break and they're on MTV, it gets old fast.

On Sunday we went Frisbee golfing at a desert-y course about 20 minutes away. Sean warned me to stay away from "jumping" catuses, and then I almost fell on top of one. It was a hot day, but I was glad to be out of rainy Portland. After finishing the course and needing a drink of water, I had my first run-in with hard water, which was probably the first thing to make my list of "Stuff I didn't think of when deciding to move to Phoenix that I now wish I had."

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