Coalinga – Week 1

I don’t even know where to begin. The past few weeks have been such a roller coaster of ups and downs, hope and disappointment. I’ve felt both liberty and bondage, relief and despair. This must be what being an adult is all about.

We moved up to Coalinga on March 18 – so excited, so hopeful. We’d paid our last month’s rent the week before as a sort of deposit so our landlord could do some work on the place before we moved in. We were moving into a little one-bedroom place that was being sectioned off of the main house behind. The doorway to the main house had to be walled in, and the landlord had ripped out a gas wall heater and left the gas stub and the hole in the wall bare. (My aunt used the term “hobbit door” since it’s about 5’7” high. In this photo he’s already worked on one side of it; you used to be able to see all the way through.)  We were eager to be on our own, and I was especially glad to have my own kitchen space so I could be me. I loved staying with my dad’s brother and sister-in-law; they are such awesome people! Sometimes, though, I felt like I couldn’t be myself because – let’s face it – I’m not the world’s neatest person, and with my eyesight being pretty bad, I have a hard time cleaning up messes that other people see. And trying to constantly clean up after a 16-month-old and keep him out of trouble just about did me in. So it was a relief to have settled on our own place.

When we moved up the 18th, we brought a small moving truck, since my aunt & uncle had given us some furniture as a house-warming gift. We made the long drive (six hours by car) in about eight hours. I drove our car, and David followed in the U-Haul. (I have great respect for anyone who has driven a truck, even a small one!) It was a hot journey, as the air conditioning in our car doesn’t work. David, meanwhile, was wearing his jacket in the U-Haul because he didn’t want to take the time to figure out how to turn off the A/C. ;) And we left San Diego around noon, so we hit L.A. during the beginning of rush hour. Yuck. It wasn’t terrible, but it was bad enough that a few times, I thought I’d lost David at a freeway split. I was glad to get to the mountains and know we were together.

We arrived in Coalinga a bit after 20:00, so we drove the last hour or two in the dark. Lots of bugs on the windscreen… We rested that evening and the next day were able to get keys to our new place. We discussed some of the issues, and our landlord said he would definitely get everything taken care of soon.

So Friday we drove the U-Haul over to unload. We had a delay because our landlord’s car was in the driveway, and we couldn’t reach him either by knocking on his door or by phone. So we waited for a few hours, finally got a hold of him, and tried again. We unloaded pretty quickly but were disappointed that no work at all had been done to section off our apartment, the hobbit hole was still wide open with the gas stub sticking out, and our landlord’s stuff was still all over the kitchen. We had to unload so we could return the truck before we got charged extra, but we decided not to move in yet, since my aunt offered to let us stay with them as long as we needed to.

Saturday, I went over for a few hours to get some work done for my job on the Internet. Our laptop can’t connect to my aunt’s wireless network, and we’d been told by our landlord that we could get a good signal from a local wireless hub for free. Right. It wasn’t free, and it isn’t even a good signal, but I figured we’d be here awhile, so I went ahead and signed up for the service. I got my work done, and that was that.

Thus ends our first week in Coalinga.