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It's been awhile, so I should probably at least give some rough outline of what I've been up to lately.

First a quick catch up: I graduated with my BA in June. It was a long process, begun back in the Fall of 2k5, paused for basically the entirety of 2k9, but now finally done with. Like most recent grads, the celebration wore off with the steady realization that the job market is total crap and I don't really know what to do with myself.

So I've spent the Summer looking for work (a process begun over the winter and stepped up last Spring, but which really heated up after graduation). I've had my moments of desperation, but I'm still holding in there. I have to confess, I actually turned down the one job offer I did get. Before you condemn me though, let me explain.

They wanted to pay me $10/hr, work me overtime pretty much daily (which at least would help my pay check a little), and possibly through lunch as well. All this in a city where apartments go for about $900-1200 a month... that's for a 1 bedroom of around 600 square feet mind you. Now, I really don't care that much about money, and I would have liked the work pretty well I think, but most apartments require proof of an income around 3 times rent... which is never going to happen on $10/hr. Now if my boyfriend had landed a job in the area around the same time I would have gone for it for sure. But so far, he's still looking too =/

There were other problems as well. For one thing, they wanted me to start in less than a week, but I was still finishing packing and didn't have a new apartment yet (because of the afore mentioned income restraints making it extremely difficult to locate one at all, let alone something not in the slums). Also, the apartments I did find (all of them requiring a greater income anyway) weren't going to be available for another 2-3 weeks at best. This meant even if I could find a way to bluff the income requirements, I would still be blowing all my moving money on a hotel just so I could get to work at all. Plus, I'd be leaving my boyfriend to finish all the packing, clean the apartment, rent a truck, and drive our stuff over alone. I might be able to go back on the weekend and help him some, but that's the best we could have hoped for. Forget that!

So I asked them for an extension. They said maybe 2 days, which would have made it a week barely. I told them I'd try to pack and move as fast as possible, and get back to them later. A couple days after, I e-mailed them saying there was just no way I could manage it (by then it was obvious we couldn't move that fast and couldn't really afford for me to live in a hotel anyway). At which point they dumped me -_-; Screw unreasonable people. I have a BA and you can't pay me enough to live above the poverty line? And I have to start immediately even though I live half a state away, which you knew from day one (it's on my resume and we brought it up first thing at the interview), otherwise forget it? Well forget you then too.

In all this back and forth, I scheduled another interview with a company which had a much more realistic proposed start date and salary, not to mention great benefits. I thought it was worth the gamble, so I wasn't afraid at all when I sent that last e-mail telling them I had to have more time. Sadly... that interview didn't pan out either. *sigh* So now here I am, back at square one again.

Right now I'm house sitting for my grandparents, which covers up the fact that I'm really basically homeless. All our stuff is in storage, except a couple suit cases and some kitchen stuff we brought with us. Oh, and my cat and her essentials. I managed to squeeze in my guitar (after much pleading and haggling with my boyfriend about space limitations and the necessity of a musical instrument, but I just couldn't leave it in storage and risk it being warped by temperature extremes crying okay?!?) and we have our computers. So I can write, look for jobs, and de-stress by wasting time on Gaia razz

So yeah, apart from a fun weekend trip with a friend out to her family's cabin in the woods, some berry pickin', and work (my part time job and my internship with the later ending with the month of August) that's been my summer.... Guess it's been an experience at least. And really, over all, I don't feel too bad about it. Sometimes sure, but mostly I'm feeling okay. I have this underlying feeling like I'm on the right course. While our primary plans have all kinda been put on hold or shot to hell =/ our back-up plan was pulled off without a hitch. So now as long as I can find something by the end of the month, it'll all be a great story for later and no worries. If not... well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

If nothing else, we head back to California, stay with my boyfriends family until he can hopefully use his connections to snag a job, and we start the battle of escaping L.A. all over again =/ Not the end of the world really. Provided his connections pay off, I would be cool with that. But he really doesn't like the idea, so I'm hoping we can avoid the whole thing for his sake and just go straight to finding work on the other side of the mountains (where we really wanna be) or at least in this area. It would make it a lot easier to finally make the move to our first choice city.