Surreal Phone Call

We live in the DC metro area.  My fiancee is in LA right now for work.  We’ve talked every day since I came home and she stayed out there for work, but we don’t usually talk in the middle of the day much because we’re both working.  So when she calls in the middle of the day and I see her number on the caller ID I took pause for a second.

And the way she opened up the call didn’t exactly help. “I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but I’m okay.”  I don’t know a better way to start off a conversation about being fine in an earthquake, but I don’t like this one.  Now I could be remembering this totally wrong, but that’s what I remember her saying; I could be way off.  Obviously my first reaction is concern, and “what the hell are you talking about?”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that she was talking about the earthquake, which I hadn’t heard about yet.  Once she clued me in on what happened, my head was all confused.  If I had heard about the quake before I talked to her, I’m sure I would have freaked.  But since she told me she was okay before I knew about it, part of my head was thinking, “freak out, she was in an earthquake,” and the other part of my brain was thinking, “dude, chill out.  She said she was fine and everything was okay.”

Part of the strangeness of the conversation was that earthquakes were always something that happened on TV, usually described by a news anchor.  Living on the east coast all my life, I’ve never really been confronted with earthquake issues.  My sister and her family lived in the Bay area for a while, but I don’t remember there being an earthquake of significance there while she was there.

Having my fiancee go through her first, is really, really messed up to think about, and yet it still doesn’t feel completely real…and I’m not sure why.  I’m still really having trouble getting my head around it.

Bottom line is that I’m excedingly happy that she’s okay, and that it seems that there wasn’t any real damage of note to the city and no reports of people hurt last time I heard.

Mini-freak out

I had a mini-freak out today.  I just realized that I’m leaving in less than two weeks to live and work in Los Angeles for a month.  I mean, I’ve known for a while that I was going, but I just realized that we’re scheduled to leave in two weeks.  I’m really not sure I’m ready.  There isn’t a lot for me to do to get ready, but I’m not sure I’m mentally prepared.

Its sort of a weird situation.  My fiancee is working at a firm in LA for the summer with the possibility of being offered a job at the firm after she finishes law school next year.  Since I’ve only spent a couple of days in LA in my life, I got a 30 day assignment to work out of our office in LA to help my fiancee and I get an idea of whether we’d be happy living in LA.  Given that we’re going together, I’m not anxious about missing her, but I feel a bit weird about leaving my apt. behind for a month.  Not like its going to get lonely not having us around, but it still feels strange.  Maybe its a little bit of the control freak in me that wants to make sure things are fine around here while we’re gone.

The other thing I am a little anxious about is the fact that we’re driving out to LA.  My friancee needed to have her car out there this summer and since her first day of work is my 30th birthday we decided to make the trip or combined “get her to LA/30th birthday road trip.”  I’ve always thought driving across the country would be one of those adventure/self-discovery kinds of trips that would bring about self-evaluation and personal growth and a new wonderful outlook on life.  Given the limited time we have to make the trip, I’m not sure there’s going to be enough time for self-exploration.  We’re going to have hard days of driving broken up by days visiting family and friends in W.V., Missouri, and Denver, with a stop at the Grand Canyon thrown in for good measure.  It should be a really interesting trip, but I’m sure I’m going to be ready to be out of the car by the time we get there.

One way or the other, it should be a fun time and I’m looking forward to it.  At least I will be when I get my mind wrapped around the fact we’re leaving so soon.

Two Important Lessons

I discovered two important things tonight.

1. Eclipses are still cool no matter how old I get.

2. Trying to take pictures of an eclipse when there is a windchill of 16 is pretty stupid.

For those of you that didn’t know, there was a full lunar eclipse tonight.  Its stuff like that that gives me one of those, “wow the universe is freakin big and I’m pretty insignificant in the greater scheme of things” feelings.  Its also just cool to see the moon like that.  It makes it more like a real object instead of just a big glowing ball in the sky when you can really see the texture and details of the craters on the surface.

When my hands thaw out, I’ll check to see if any of the pictures we took turned out, but I’m not real optimistic.