Some of my friends called me tonight while drunk. From what I could make out from the slurring, they miss me. They also want me to visit, which seems odd because even though I've been here for a month I feel like I just got here. I think while I was in corporate housing, with the nice furniture, this whole move felt more like one long adventure...like I was studying abroad in Seattle. Now that I have my guitars and my ugly cheap furniture, and now that I've spent a night or two sleeping on my crappy futon, it has begun to sink in. I live in Seattle. Lets be honest: I was barely aware of this entire city most of my life. I'd heard of it, sure. And I knew it wasn't near where I lived. Now I'm here. And my back hurts from this stupid futon. How did I sleep on this thing for a year and a half? And I don't have anyone to play Settlers with. I was going to post on craigslist something about hanging out and playing Settlers, but when I looked at the other posts they were all like rock climbing and softball and football. My post would be like the dorkiest one there. Ok this one about a puppy pay date...thats pretty dorky.

In other news, I went to Ikea with Luke today and spent a $900 on Ikea furniture. I really hate checking out at a store and finding out what I'm spending. Somehow the grand total always seems larger than the sum of all the price tags I looked at...by a factor of 4. And we went to Ikea because we wanted cheap furnature. And I passed (for now) on buying the cool L-shaped couch that turns into an awesome queen bed, because it was too expensive. Actually, thats not true. It was all gray and ugly. If it was black, I would have bought it. Anyway, instead, I bought a bed that was labeled $200. Thought it was a great deal. But then, like, you have to get slats, and a metal thing, and the cheapest queen mattress they had, and its more like $500. And then...then I bought a kitchen table, so that I would have somewhere to play Settlers. And then I bought the minimum number of chairs I would need to play Settlers with two of my imaginary friends: 3 chairs. And then a drawer...some swedish fish...pear cider...$900! WTF? How do poor and/or frugal people get furnature? I know they have it. Maybe I should have looked on craiglist...except you really dont want to look on craigslist for a mattress. Ohh...I could have gotten a bed. Like last time. Or some chairs. Dammit. Each chair was like $40. I hate money. I don't even know what to do with my sign-on bonus from Amazon: I don't want to put it in the stock market, cause that sucks, and my cousin says when its in a regular old savings account the interest is so low that you actually lose money after taxes and inflation. My money is currently in a savings account.

Anyway...so I actually got my first task done this past week. I realized, then, just what a scary prospect it was. I wrote code that is eventually going to make it into production. Sure, people are going to look at it and test it and all that, but code I wrote is actually going to power the website. Real data from people in the real world is actually going to pass through my functions. And I don't work one some fun feature of the site. I work on the backbone. If I screw up badly enough, Amazon will lose a lot of money. I'm not exaggerating. The wheels of industry will stop (metaphorically speaking) and people will not get their crap. Its a good time though. I like being just a programmer, and working with people who are also programmers. Good programmers. I never look at someone's code and want to scream. Actually that's not true. Last week I couldn't figure out why my crap wasn't working and I dug a little too deep into the bowels of their code base, and did not like what I found there. I probably shouldn't tell you what it was, so I'll leave you with an analogy: making toast with a nuclear reactor.

Still haven't really hung out with anyone that I didn't already know before, but I know which Salsa club I'm going to try next: China Harbor. Its half the distance to Century Ballroom. Also, a bunch of salsa classes are starting up, so that should be a good way to meet people. Aw, man, now I miss my friends from La Luna. Of course, the nostalgia is partly mitigated by that disaster with Kristal...never has "out of your league" been so literal. That was a good learning experience though. Now I know that life is not like a chick flick. For example, if the girl of your dreams asks you to be her dance partner in a performance class that is above your ability, you should find out if she is dating the dance instructor before you say yes. That is some valuble information right there. Also, if you are not confident of your ability to perform, if you think there is a good chance you might screw up big and not be able to recover, those aren't just nervous jitters. That is a real danger.

Not to worry, though. They don't really have big studios with lots of performance classes out here anyway...at least I haven't found one yet. Nothing on the scale of La Luna.