After a day like today, you think to yourself that it can’t get any worse and the shock and surprise when it does get worse is not as shocking and surprising as it should be. You have learned to roll with the punches, or simply no longer care.

Real estate here in the bay area is astronomically high. I am trying to save money until I can get a job which will enable me to afford a place. I am getting unemployment from NYS, but $300 a week doesn’t quite pay for a 1 bedroom apartment at around $1,000 a month. (I have seen studio apartments for as low as $800, but not too practical for three people). This is also an incentive to get a job and not just build website after website.

Last night I decided I wanted to try to find a place nearby where I spend the majority of my day. (A shopping center that has multiple places to eat, a gym that I have a membership with so I can shower, and a Starbucks that supplies me with internet, all this is also a mile or better from my wife.) I found a hotel not too far away and I thought that if I spent the night in the parking lot no one would raise alarm to a suspicious vehicle with out of state plates in the parking lot.

I have only been in California for a short time, yet I see so many things that are different it is shocking.  Not only have I see my first Lamborginhi in person, but I have seen many other things like a segway, and more porshe’s and antique cars than I care to count.  My wife tells me that it hasn’t rained in the three months she has been here which back in New York its just the oppisite.  The roads here twist and wind which were fun the first day, now I get dizzy just thinking about driving.  Back home they speak English, here I don’t know but I think the majority is Spanish.  Nothing is free and everything costs outragous prices.  The gas is about $0.20 higher per gallon, a one bedroom apartment goes for around $1,000 a month.

I am really curious how much I will get paid when I get a job cause if its not significantly more than New York I am still going to be living in my car.  I think that is my biggest problem is I wasn’t expecting the vast amount of change.

Since I have been here it has been next to impossible trying to find a free Wi-Fi connection. So I finally broke down and registered for T-mobile’s Wi-Fi package at $30 a month. Not something I figured into my budget but with everything that I do online I can’t live without internet.

Since I have internet now I have been able to post all the older posts that I have written along the route here and since. I have been writing them in MS OneNote and it’s easy to forget about them.

Sorry for the delay, I know some people have been looking forward to them. I know I also talked about video blogging, but I am not used to driving on the road here. On a map it looks like someone with cerebral palsy drew the blueprints for the roads and the camera went flying off the seat and into a small trash can I keep in my car which dumped soda on the camera. It still works, except the view screen.

Anyway here are the blog posts and I think I will keep it just to writing like I always have. At least for now.

In an attempt to save money I have acquired camp grounds for a couple days. I have been staying at Mount Diablo State Park which costs $20 a day. This might possibly be worth it if they had showers and it wasn’t a 20 minute, 7 mile drive up the windy road which could easily be mistaken as a contour line and not a road on a map.

I paid $60 for three days and it has been more of an inconvenience than it is worth. The park closes its gates at sunset which lately has been about 8:30 here. Which if I am not in the gates by that time I’m not getting in. The first night I stayed out until 10 with my wife so I couldn’t even spend the night that first night. However I was able to clean everything out of the car so I had lots of room for sprawling out. Something I haven’t been able to do on the road.

I was planning on spending more time here but I don’t see the point. I pay $20 a night for a curfew and a place to pop a tent? I don’t really even need the tent. I wanted a place to cook food and take a shower, but can’t do either. I even explored the more fancy campgrounds and they don’t have any showers either. Then with California being as dry as it is fires aren’t allowed. So I am back to pondering…, what’s the point?

My wife has found one place that I can rent which is about $600 a month. It’s basically someone’s spare room that they have in the house, but at $20 a day this camp ground is the same price with none of the features an apartment would have.

Here shortly I will pull up camp and go looking for a gym membership so I can take a shower.

Today is day one of looking for a job.  My expectations were less than desired to say the least.  I started my day by driving all the way to Oakland, about an hour drive, to visit the Veteran Affairs office.  Not only were they completely useless but they were an embarrassment to associate myself in the same playing field by calling us both veterans.  The first office I visited had me wait for over 90 minutes (I was the first one to arrive too), then after I talked to the person and explained what I wanted she gave me a funny look handed me a book and said to go downstairs.

I went downstairs and they complained that they need to stop sending people here cause they can’t help them.  He pointed to a list of job postings on the wall and said that is everything they have upstairs and continued to complain about the people upstairs.

The wall held two clipboards worth of job listings.  The newest posting on the one clipboard was from 2006, and the other only held two postings from 2008 (February and March).  Then as I flipped back further through the listings I quickly found myself looking at job listings from 1999 and getting older as I flipped further back.  I gave up and told the guy and he seemed overwhelmingly surprised, again going back to everything being someone else’s fault.  The guy who stands next to the front desk all day and stares at these listings, and who also referred myself to them, began to blame someone else.