…if I ever want to move anywhere except Los Angeles. I was just looking at a little weather application I have in my toolbar that pulls current temp/weather for various cities I’ve set up.

Currently in my neighborhood in LA it is 40 degrees. And it is 31 in Chicago. And that wee difference makes me want to stomp my feet like a petulant child before diving under about fifteen layers of blankets to try and sleep, using the cat as a footwarmer.

Though they might have a more reasonable policy on insulation than my building’s “Eh, let the chill leak in. How cold does it get in LA?” philosophy, I am going to be in very deep trouble if I ever have to take a job in a place with a normal climate.

YOU actually have to do all the planning.

You can’t fall back on your travel buddy who’s far better than you are at deciphering train and bus timetables, even when you speak the language they’re printed in and he doesn’t.

You can’t divvy up researching the “cultural stuff vs. historical stuff” according to who’s more interested in what, to make it easier to determine what’s actually worth seeing given your time constraints.

You have to read both the “Hey stoners, want to see some cool shit?” and “Hey American middle-aged dentist traveling abroad, want to see some culture?” travel guides you’ve purchased instead of having one person read one and one person read the other, and being able to quickly figure out which sites are recommended by both.

You can’t fob stuff off on your travel buddy when you have a busy week and allow him to fob stuff off on you when he does in turn.

And you have only yourself to blame when you’re up until almost 3am a month before you leave, and you still have only a vague idea where you’re staying or what you’re seeing.

I’m sure the freedom to do whatever I feel like will come in handy when I’m actually bouncing around Spain, but I seriously underestimated how much more of a pain in the ass the planning process becomes when you’re doing it all yourself.

I’m a little fried.

This calc class I’m taking is significantly more difficult than the last one (mostly due to the professor, for reasons which I’m saving for what will be a rather caustic evaluation), and the physics class, which I knew was going to be hard, is pretty damn hard.

I’m basically taking the equivalent of an 18 credit quarter right now (normal courseload at UCLA is recommended to be 16 credits), and I think I will be doing that for much of the next year.

I’m also extremely rusty at much of the algebra and have always been terrible at trigonometry, and physics and calc are full of both, so it’s taking me significantly longer than the professors claim it will to do all the homework.

So yeah, been nice knowing all of you, I’ll be here in my room doing homework until approximately June.

That’s almost the worst thing about all this: My roommate is out of the country for ten days and I have spent a total of about two hours in the living room, most of it doing calc homework. The rest of the time is in my bedroom, on the computer or doing calc/physics homework.

Also, I’d like to note that whoever came up with trig integrals can go fuck themselves. The formulas are so complicated I can’t even type them (the last four here are good examples of what I’m dealing with), and they make me want to beat my head against the wall until I see gray matter.

I’m hoping that this will get a little bit easier in the fall when I’m at least interested in SOME of the classes I’m taking and will see a longer-term purpose than “I just have to get as high a grade as possible in this stupid class” to what I’ll be doing.

In the meantime, I’ll be studying, working out, eating, and sleeping, in that order of priority, chanting over and over again, “It’s just a year. It’s just a year. It’s just a year.”

I am tired of a few things right about now:

• unemployment
• being worried about my cat being sick
• my cat actually being sick
• my wireless router constantly flaking on me
• falling back into my natural sleep pattern of 2am-9am
• having to adjust to my new orthotics
• having to get out of the pool while I still have a ton of energy because there’s a line
• being so stressed I still have a ton of energy after swimming 2.5km
• not having a job
• the fact that I’m grinding my teeth when I’m awake now
• my unemployment check being late
• the entire female reproductive process and all the joy it entails
• the four walls of my apartment
• little earthquakes causing petrifying fear of bigger ones
• having to constantly rejigger the numbers of when, exactly, I’m going to go broke
• the continuing need for physical therapy exercises on my bad foot.
• needing a goddamn job.

Some of these won’t be changing any time soon, but the current combination is quickly turning me into a complete fucking crazy person.

I’ve written repeatedly about how I hate Sprint and their shitty shitty reception with the fire of a thousand suns, but last night just about tore it for me.

I had what the phone kept telling me were four bars of reception and yet:

• I could not place an outgoing phone call for over 20 minutes, and did not receive an important call I’d been waiting all day for
• When I tried to text people to complain about it, I kept getting error messages indicating said messages had not gone through. Of course, the recipients informed me this morning that they’d all gotten multiple copies of the text.

I really need to line up my next job to be able to afford the switch, but I’m perilously close to flinging my financial rectitude to the wind and just buying a goddamn iPhone.

I’ve said it before (and I’m sure I’ll be saying it again): Fuck Sprint.

Several large expenses are cropping up in my life, and they’ve conveniently chosen to do so a) at the same time and b) when I took an underpaying job just so I wouldn’t lose my mind. Causing the most fun at the moment:

The Bed. My bedframe, which has lasted me a good while and at least two moves longer than a cheap-ass Ikea piece of shit should, is falling apart. And this weekend it literally fell apart, though I’ve jury-rigged it so it works until I get a new one.

I knew after my last move it wasn’t long for this world, and I’d really wanted to get a fairly decent bedframe to replace it when it finally went. That was before my old job evaporated.

I’ve found a couple in the $600-700 range at West Elm that I really like, but right now I’m not sure I can afford more than the $200 it would cost to get another cheap, shitty Ikea frame.

Cost to replace: $200-700 + tax, depending on how good a bed I decide to get.

The Car. This isn’t as bad as it could be, particularly given that I’m putting about 700 miles a week on it, but my car is about to hit 120,000 miles, which means a 120,000 mile tuneup.

The dealer quoted me $500, my friendly local mechanic quoted me $300. Guess which one will be performing this maintenance.

I also need a battery, as I discovered a couple weeks ago, so that’ll be about another $100.

Total cost to ensure continued proper functioning of vehicle: $400 + tax.

The Clothes. This is at least for a happy reason, but the death-by-a-thousand-cuts this is causing is pissing me off a bit.

I’ve lost a lot of weight in the last 14 months, so a lot of my old clothes don’t fit anymore. I’ve dropped three jeans sizes, I’m now fitting about a size smaller shirts, and other articles of clothing are needing to be similarly replaced.

I’m trying to get away with wearing my now tent-sized old clothes as long as I can. I was always pretty good at camouflaging the actual extent of my fatassedness, so I can still do pretty well with a fair amount of my older stuff. But the number of items I can still get away with is rapidly declining.

I’m going to take a stab at thrifting for t-shirts and the like, but certain…delicates…you have to buy new, and that gets very expensive very quickly. Even buying stuff on sale from Old Navy, the cost to gradually replace my wardrobe is running around $100-200 a month.

It will continue to do so for much of the remainder of the year, until I stop losing weight.

Estimated cost through end of May: $200-400 + tax.

Grand total, that’s anywhere from $800-1500, plus tax, that I’ll be spending in the next couple of months.

The $600 “Please for the love of God save our economy!” check from W. and the gang will help, as will the fact that I’ve been making a fucking mint off of mileage at my temp job, which is helping to offset the crap salary.

However, I really would have preferred all these expenses come to me when I a) had a job at my normal salary and b) wasn’t coughing up for my health insurance out of pocket.

Stupid money.

Being unemployed in January is probably a good thing for the average gadget geek like myself, since the twin peaks of lust for shiny things both take place during the first couple of weeks of January.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is taking place in Las Vegas this week, where almost every electronics company is unveiling its product lineup for 2008.

Next week brings the annual MacWorld Expo, where Apple faithful come to drool over whatever lickably shiny object Steve Jobs deigns to unveil during his keynote address.

Both of these events lead to an absolute orgy of gadget blog coverage (Google Reader is buckling under the weight of the feeds just of Engadget and Gizmodo), and to try and keep up even without having a job to do on top of it is a bloody nightmare.

I mean, it is fun to read about crazy shit like the leopard-print Taser with mp3 playing holster, the LCD you install on your car bumper so other people can watch what you’re watching, or the 150 inch plasma TV that is over five times the size of my Gigantic Damn TV.

What would have been even better is to have seen these ridiculous items in person. Alas, it is not to be.

The thing that really sucks is that theoretically, if I had the money, I could have gone to both CES and MacWorld and at least gotten on the exhibit floors. This is also one of the very few times I would actually be able to attend either conference.

The problem is, between rent and COBRA, I’m burning through my unemployment checks completely before the first of the month is even over, and every other expense I have comes straight out of savings.

So burning $40-50 on admissions fees per conference plus approximately one billion dollars per tank on gas (just over two tanks to Vegas and back, more like three to SF) is not really in the cards.

I tell you, it is going to kill me next week to be sitting here, knowing that I could have been in San Francisco groping the goofy gadgets I’m simply staring at pictures of, but my stupid fiscal responsibility is winning out.

You’re all now officially On Notice.

Chicago was awesome. The game was ridiculous. Reuniafest was everything I’d hoped for and then some. I didn’t get to see everyone I wanted to see since I was only in town for two and a half days, but I got to see a decent number of y’all, which was great.

I didn’t want to come back, and I so do not want to go back to work tomorrow. Stupid reality.

Anyway, a few odds and ends from the weekend:

- Nate and I stayed with Mark, and that led to my favorite Inappropriate Joke of the weekend, which was that we were off having threesomes, but they were the worst threesomes ever because absolutely no one was getting what they wanted.

- [whining]I hate my foot. Hate hate hate hate hate. It hurt all weekend, I kept having to sit on barstools instead of actually standing to talk to people, I repeatedly had to leave early because it hurt, and I blew about $50 on cabs I probably wouldn’t have blown if I could walk more than a few blocks without feeling like my leg was going to fall off. This horseshit better end soon.[/whining]

- Man, I’ve gotten spoiled living in California where you basically can’t smoke anywhere indoors. My throat is still killing me from trying to shout over the music in several smoke-filled bars, and all my clothes smell like they spent the weekend at the bottom of an ashtray. You guys will love life when the ban goes into effect at the beginning of the year.

- So for those of you who heard me panicking about the potential writers’ strike, here’s a fairly good summary of why TV people in particular are panicking about this.

- On the flight back, as we were coming in for a landing, I got some sort of air bubble in my sinuses, leading to some of the most excruciating pain I’ve felt in several years. And I include everything involved in my foot ridiculousness in that. Fortunately, it managed to dissipate by the time we landed, but I’m still feeling residual pain. Ow.

Part of why things have trailed off a touch on this blog is because of the absolutely absurd amount of gym time I’ve been putting in lately.

5 days a week, killing myself at the gym, waiting for the tiny little reward on Sundays when I see that, if I’m lucky and have been trying to watch what I eat, all that fighting has lost…one pound!

This all started in February, after several weeks of sedentary moping, when I looked at the scale and saw a number I swore I’d never see.

I’m a quarter of the way to where I want to be from where I was, which, thinking about it, is actually pretty decent. But the slow, slow pace is just maddening.

I’m hitting something similar with my foot (which I go to Physical Therapy for the other two days a week), where it’s miles better than it was, but the pain and continued PT are making me nuts.

I want to be in shape and running around, not fighting for ever tenth of an inch of plantarflexion and just about dying on the recumbent bike.

Stupid body. Why must you make me pay for my prior indiscretions?