shinyPlasticBag

Good news, everyone: I found an apartment! It’s a beautiful, 1950s loft in Redwood City. Redwood freaking City! Can you imagine? Somewhere not-so-far-away, in the 1980s, a high-tech factory was pumping out beautiful (and doomed) NeXT Cubes. Being in Silicon Valley rules, just because every town seems to have a company and a story associated with it: Mountain View/Google, Sunnyvale/Yahoo, Palo Alto/PARC, Cupertino/Apple…it’s weird and awesome. I love it here! (Have I mentioned that enough yet?)

Speaking of Google, I had supper there tonight with Brian and Jen, his ladyfriend. It’s a very neat campus — there’s a bronze dinosaur skeleton in the middle of all of the buildings, and a bunch of different cafeterias stuffed with interesting varieties of (free) food. It looks like a highly populated university campus, except everyone there is a computer geek. There are lava lamps all over the place, and every building has at least one screen scrolling by a random selection of search queries. It was pretty much everything I expected from Google — mind-bogglingly huge and clearly optimized for brain throughput. Awesome.

But yeah the loft! It’s super cool: the entire front of it is windows, looking out to a lemon tree and a nice, big, grassy area with a few trees. The living room and kitchen are separated by a built-in table thing, and everything looks trés fifties. The bedroom and bathroom are upstairs, and they have an overhang looking down on the living room. It’s epic and awesome and I can’t wait until I move into it (which will be on Saturday). After three weeks of living in a hotel room, I’ll be glad to be settled. I’m feeling much more at home here now than I was a week or so ago, having made friends and learned my way around the area. I can now drive between obvious destinations (San Mateo, Mountain View, Redwood City, Sunnyvale) without really needing the GPS. I recognize landmarks and everything — look at me, learning, like I’m a grown-up or something. It’s madness!

Anyway, I’ve got to go shower and sleep and all the other fun s-words. Until next time, world.