Having lived in Portland and LA (but not SF) I can tell you that Portland combines a major small town feel with a fairly urban environment - decent variety of ethnic food, though not up to SF, decent variety of culture - though not up to SF. (Up to the LA I knew, but my LA knowledge is too many decades out of date to useful.) Also - though good on the shopping and resteraunt thing - not anything like as multi-cultural as LA or SF. It has great public transit. It has powells and that is a mega-cool bookstore. Plus a fair number of other indendet bookstores. Not really making a case over SF am I? Advantages over SF - lower cost living, and I'll bet the small town feel is smaller cause it is a smaller city than SF. SF has a much higher numbers of buffistas including JZ and Hecubot and Deborah Grabien as well. I think we have two Portland Buffistas, but have not checked map lately.

Teppy -- that is so something I would do -- which is EXACTLY why I try to pay my bills online as much as possible.

This happened back when online bill-pay was just barely starting -- now, I pay every single bill online. I can't remember the last time I mailed anything.

vw -- I had this weird habit of losing one earring from the same pair (my blue scarabs) on vacation, and then the next time I went to use my luggage, I'd find the damn earring. It happened at least 3 vacations in a row, with the same pair of earrings. I think the earring just really likes my luggage.

Yeah, I don't pay anything by hand anymore.

Great news, vw!

Yay vw! What fun to find lost treasure.

Go Bangkok! Choose Bangkok!

See now, this is what I would do. That said, SF & Portland have better air than LA. I love LA, but found it hard to breathe.

I'd pimp Florida, but if you don't like it hot it would not be so good for you.

I'd pimp Florida, but if you don't like it hot it would not be so good for you.

Yeah, the only way I'm willing to do hot is if it's also dry. Also, the fewer insects the better. I know there's no way to have none (short of moving to Antarctica, where I hear there aren't many schools), but at least if there are cockroaches they shouldn't be able to fly. That's my stand.

I don't know Portland, so I can't comment. What bothered me most about LA is that it is such a car place. I never saw anyone walking anywhere. What appealed to me about SF was that I coould walk and bump into things. what I like about the bay area is that you don't have to be in the middle of a city. - dense suburbia if you want to be close to a city, but you can have your own space. so you can teach in oakland, but be ufrther away ( though there are some very comfortable areas of oakland). Honestly, if you come to the west coast , even if you ( correctly ) chose the bay area - there is enough variety for exploration

My refrigerator is not cooling. All the freezer stuff is thawed. I have another fridge in the garage, but it has stuff in it too. Ugh. The veggies and stuff I don't think will matter I am stuffing in the freezer next door. I'll have to cook the other stuff. Annoying because I bought a bunch of food to cook this weekend already.

It's less than a year old, so it should be covered. Still. Very annoying. I think the big lightning stuff yesterday may have damaged it.

Whether you walk or not in LA depends on where you live. My last apartment, five minutes by car from where I am now? I could walk to two different grocery stores, a million restaurants, a couple bookstores and two movie theatres...that's the thing about being so spread out--one's daily reality in one part of Santa Monica is nothing like what it may be in Brentwood.

I am so frustrated right now. I got in fine from SF yesterday and was so tired that I didn't have a chance to look through the place I'm staying (one of my parents' places). But this morning, it's like misery on a platter. My parents have no idea what it is like to live in this place--my dad just wanted a fixer-upper to work on for the weekends, and offered it to me for the summer, rent-free. There's no shower, only an ancient claw-foot tub; the hot water in the kitchen sink wasn't on, there's no air conditioning (and a high of 90 today, plus humidity), and this place has been the family storage area for more or less two years, which means everything is in complete disarray, nothing's organized, and there's no furniture anyway.

I mean, this isn't the worst place I could be living, really, and there's only so much you can complain about when it's rent free; but they just have no clue what you have to put into a place to make it comfortable for a resident--because they've never lived here, and they're not going to.

We got an air conditioner put in the bedroom, but that's going to be the only comfortable place in the house; the toilet was turned back on, the hot water in the kitchen is back on, and there's food in the fridge and the cable is on. But there's still so much stuff that I can't even conceive of how to make it comfortable--and there's no shower. I bought a showerhead, thinking I could attatch it to the spigot in this ancient tub, but it's so old that it doesn't fit. And there's no visible spout for me to attatch it to otherwise. I just want to take a shower, and I think I'm going to have to drive about twenty minutes away to take one. Sigh.