So the visit with my sister and her kidlets went great, and her (re)impressions of California can be summed up as follows:

We seem to have fewer fat people
The sun is much brighter
Nobody wears real shoes
Our highways sparkle in the sun

We had some adventure around San Francisco before heading south to my county, including visits to the newly remodeled children’s area at Golden Gate Park and the aquarium at Pier 39. Having already been to the Monterey aquarium many times I was not as impressed with the SF version, but the kids had a good time. My sister’s oldest even got to pet a shark after listening to detailed instructions from an employee about the proper way to pet them–”only between these two fins, okay?” said he, demonstrating with a little model shark. “They’re sensitive.” I brought the entire wad of cash I made selling crap off Craigslist this summer because from previous experience I figured we would need a hefty amount just for parking. I was right. We wound up averaging about $30 a day. I also brought a gallon of sunscreen to prevent these Casper-like visitors turning into burnt marshmallows.

Keeping my sister’s 16-month old happy was not much of a problem. She is the happy-go-lucky kid who, when she is tired and feels it is time for a nap, simply climbs up on the nearest couch with her blanket and takes one. No whining, no fussing, none of the seismic events that signal my two need a nap. She also kindly obliged with whatever the plans for the day were and ate whatever was served as food. Her older brother, on the other hand…is a bit more…high maintainance? So I can’t hate my sister too much. She got one of herself and one of me.

Besides joining me for a touching moment at the hotel one evening to split a Tramadol pill (dual-pissed bladders from something we ate), my talented sister demonstrated that it is actually possible to load a stroller on an escalator:

And I utterly failed to get her drunk. We went to SLOBrew for some drinks one evening while she was here, and the plan was that I would see how she could hold her liquor and drive us home. She can hold it all right. I’m the one that got messed up, so she ended up driving us home. This explains how she was able to drink most of the night before her wedding and still show up all fresh-faced and ready to go. She is a freak of nature. Also, she is wearing size 6 and 8 clothes again. Can you see why I hate her?

Right now I’m sick with the head cold of the month, the Makes Your Throat Burn and Allergies Go Nuts variety. It appears to be the same one Bruce had last month. I have to give my husband credit, though–he may just have solved the horrible fatigue mystery that I’ve been trying to figure out for months. I’ve seen several doctors about it and yet someone with a doctorate in ENGLISH may just have a clue. He thinks it’s a medication issue. As an experiment I went cold turkey off Lunesta about a week and half ago, and a whole bunch of weird symptoms went away. My hypoglycemia was really getting out of control, and poof–suddenly it was gone. Lunesta also made me prone to snapping at people and the scary part about that aspect was it seemed to come out of almost nowhere. That too, stopped when I ditched the pills. And lastly my short-term memory was getting so bad I was actually starting to seriously wonder if I was getting the early stages of Alzheimer’s. My memory is certainly not as sharp as it was in my pre-kids coffee-drinking days, but at least now I don’t feel like I have mad cow disease. These side effects crept up so slowly over the course of a year that I think I just got used to them, and it didn’t really occur to me to make a connection. I’ve also switched my dose of Allegra to right before bed, since I finally figured out this was one of the meds making me sleepy during the day, and sure enough it was, and was possibly made worse with the Lunesta. So while I am not absolutely sure all the drugs I was/am on is the root cause of the fatigue bouts, for now, it seems to be at bay with the changes I’ve made. (For the record Ambien wasn’t any better than Lunesta, in fact it was worse in the way it didn’t seem to wear off and made me feel like crap. And the whole “sleep loving” effect reports are real…”cuddle muffin” is one effect, “porn star” is the other. That’s all I’m going to say about that).

I can’t wait to dig through all the ph4rm4cy spam I’m going to get from this post.

I am still looking around at job listings and I have only one thing to say about employers here. They are all on crack. As I have crabbed about before, very few tech and design jobs ever come up, and when they do, they all seem to be the crack smoker variety of employers. For instance: “Must know Flash, Dreamweaver, Freehand, Photoshop, ImageReady, Illustrator, InDesign, CorelDraw, javascript, PHP, ColdFusion, and how to hand-code CSS and shopping carts. Being able to walk on water a plus.” Then: “Pay is $10 an hour.” The best ad I saw recently was a web company looking for a project manager, and to qualify you needed to be “currently gainfully employed,” and perhaps “underpaid and underappreciated.” This sort of tactic makes them sound like complete assholes and not a place I’d want to work. Not only are they eliminating a lot of tech savvy moms right off the top (like motherhood isn’t “gainful employment”…) but they are making it clear they want to steal from other companies. And yet employers get flooded with applications when these listings go live because there are so few of them here, which makes it difficult to get on top of the heap. It’s like throwing down a pile of steaks in a field of lions. As this article in the local paper points out, this county has a real problem when it comes to our job market and economy:

“San Luis Obispo County has a higher percentage of low-paying jobs and a lower percentage of high-paying jobs than the California average.”

This is why my husband works 200 miles away and why I get mad when I open the paper and all I see are job listings for ranch hands and yogurt shops. Also? About the massive debt we’re in?

“To afford the housing and have a decent standard of living—the three-bedroom, two-bathroom and two-car garage home with two children American dream—takes in excess of $100,000 in San Luis Obispo,” Watkins said.

I guess that explains why even though Bruce is bringing in decent money we have no Jags in the driveway. Average or even better-than-average income just gets you nowhere here.

Which may be why the first thing potential employers ask me is if I am planning on staying in the area.

I’m still sharpening my pencils for A+ Certification. It’s unclear if this move will have any benefit at all, but it just feels like I ought to do SOMETHING. I’m also making a minor study of SEO techniques, since my knowledge about search engine optimization essentially stopped in 2000 when SEO basically just meant making sure the header had meta tags in it. That is literally all I know how to do. Guess that explains my page rank.

I may be moving on to Wordpress next month. I’m getting irritated with my host again and having more problems with Movable Type, so I’m considering ditching both after my contract runs out next month. I have put up with numerous annoyances over the last year couple of years, from getting hacked to trashing my database multiple times to simply not being able to publish photos from Flickr (I have to code these in by hand)…enough is enough. Since I’ve gotten more comfortable with Wordpress and less comfortable about spending cash right now, I may just go with Wordpress.com. We shall see.