yucky heat, yucky bugs, pretty dress

Not that I expect anything different in Bakersfield in mid-August, but I feel the need to complain: it is freaking hot. My mother has become much less stingy about the AC, but in the absence of her enforcement, I've developed my own internal sense of guilt about wasting money and resources (see, her brainwashing--I mean upbringing--worked perfectly), so I don't turn it on very often. And quite frankly, the heat isn't very noticeable if you're watching TV with the ceiling fan on, and I do quite a bit of that these days. I'm only whining now because for the past couple days I've actually been working: organizing all the junk in my room, sorting through piles of mail and paperwork, packing up clothing and books to take back up to SF, and doing a few chores for my mother. I'm going to take as much stuff as possible with me on my next trip up to SF, because hopefully I won't be coming back to Bakersfield for a little while, because hopefully I will have a job. I haven't heard from them yet, but they told me they'd get back to me in between a week and a week and a half, and it will have been a week on Tuesday. So it will probably be at least another day or two. I've been really bad in that I haven't been looking for other work, even though it is very possible that I won't get this job. But I suppose if I don't get the job, I will be highly motivated by my lack of income to start looking again.

I'll head up to SF sometime during this coming week, and then on Friday DWE and I will drive up to Oregon to visit people and to attend MJ's wedding reception. I bought a dress today to wear to the reception; it's just a little cotton empire-waisted peasanty-looking thing that I got at Old Navy, but it's cute and it's a really pretty burgandy color and it was on sale for 50%, plus I had a coupon for an extra 20% off my purchase, so it was an absolute steal at $12. (Bonus math question: what was the original price of the dress?) I'd actually tried it on weeks ago in San Diego, and then I'd seen it again in SF, but decided not to buy it both times (which is a sort of shopping-related self-restraint that I usually don't practice). And then they only had two left at the Bakersfield store, and one of them was in my size. Very exciting (well, it was exciting for me, anyway...).

Anyway, poor DWE is in Oregon right now, dealing with the discovery that his house in St. Helens is infested with termites. He said that they are pouring out of the walls like liquid, and that inside the walls (he is starting to tear out walls in the bathroom in order to get to them) there is basically a two-foot-high pile of writhing insects. Apparently many of them are at least two inches long, and more than a few of them can fly. (For those of you who've seen it, I imagine it's a bit like that bug scene in the second Indiana Jones movie.) A friend of his, whom he described to me as "a pretty tough broad" (and I believe it, because she has a bunch of foster kids) ran screaming from the house when she saw them. I told him that I was impressed with how brave he was being, and he pointed out that he doesn't really have much of a choice. I suppose that's at least partially true, but I think most of the time when people are brave it's when they're forced to be, or at least strongly encouraged to be.

Anyway, this is just one more reason that I don't own a home, or a car, or anything else of value other than my iPod and my computer, and my computer isn't even valuable anymore because it turns off for no reason all the time. Which is why I'm using my mother's laptop right now, which is why my mother is looking at me impatiently because she is supposed to be working.