In short

Hi everybody! I'm back in Santa Fe, surrounded by the remnants of over three feet of snow! I'm pretty bummed that I missed the big storm, but judging by the empty shelves, even now, at Trader Joes...it might have been a little bit too much for me and the Mazda to handle. Ben H loves his new camera, and it's oddly liberating to be able to take pictures of anything you want. For example:

This is the gate that leads to our apartment (I would take a picture of our apartment door but there is some trash outside of it waiting to be carried to the garbage can). Anyway! I wanted to give a very, very brief review of my time since I left many of you in Maine.
Southern California is kind of a miracle. Really...all of you Midwesterners reading this who scorn the Western United States (and especially California) because they are so new and big and...what goes on out there anyway?! I was once one of you, and am now completely converted. Beautiful!!:

I have already posted beautiful pictures of where Ben lives in California so I opted for one from New Mexico instead. Anyway, I get to California, then many New Years celebrations set in, which include, but are not limited to, really good food, a New Years Eve sushi dinner with Ben, and interogating a pregnant woman at a party about her pregnancy and her midwives and her time as a JET teacher in Osaka. Happy New Year! For the first couple days of 2007, Ben and I mostly watched HGTV and the Food Network. I LOVE shows about real estate. Some favorites of mine are Flip That House, Buy Me, Hidden Potential, and My House is Worth What? My favorite thing about these shows is giving into the temptation to think, "I could do this sooooo much better than they can!" What gives me this confidence, you ask? I think I must have been born with it, because it is certainly not founded on reality. And it's a really dangerous temptation, too, because house-flipping, when subjected to montage sequences, seems to go by very quickly and easily...and so I find myself dreaming little dreams of flipping houses and making all the money I'll need for school...
On the 4th, Ben took me to the Disney Concert Hall to hear the L.A. Phil. play Rachmaninoff, Bartok, and Kodaly. I have a really deep-seated discomfort with anything Hungarian because of Laszlo, but on this occassion I totally got over it and just enjoyed the show. (Bartok and Kodaly are Hungarian composers). Except for the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, which really sucked, in my opinion. The concert hall was very beautiful a wonderful, wonderful performance space. Anyone, incidentally, who likes the Disney Concert Hall should pay a visit to Santa Fe's Opera House. It was rainy and dark and cold, so we don't have any good pictures of the concert hall, and the Asian camera Nazis inside the theatre wouldn't let us take pictures, so:


There is seating on all four sides of the stage, and almost everything you see is made of wood. That weird-looking thing with things shooting off of it from all angles is their organ. Anyway, it's really cool.
So then we had a few more days of cable-binging, and then it was Ben's mom's birthday, and we were all kind of sick...
And then Brock came to visit. This was super fun, actually, especially because Ben's mom and Brock hit it off so well (which inspired Brad to ask, "What mom doesn't love Brock?"). Good point, Brad. On the way to take Brock to the airport, and visit Brad, we got a flat tire. This really sucked:

but he made it to the airport on time. Then I couldn't go to IKEA (I love you, IKEA!) as planned, but had to go to Pasadena to get a new tire. Boo. THEN, Ben and I made the fateful trip to Brad's in El Segundo. Two thumbs up to Brad's new locale, by the way. For those of you who may have, like myself, Google-Earthed Brad's address and been unimpressed by its position between the airport, water-treatment facilities, and other factory-looking things, rest assured that it is actually a very cute and cozy little town, kind of Worthington-y, in a SoCal kind of way. We watched the game, which sort of ruined our visit. We'd planned to go out for dinner after for Brad's birthday, but were so dejected that we ended up driving around in sorrow and going to Starbucks for some fortifying beverage to help Ben and me for our drive back home. I fell ill sometime during the third quarter...oh yeah! It was when all became hopeless.

This photo was not dramatized. It expresses my actual suffering. Great sweatshirt, Mandy! Thanks! So I then had the flu...and I won't go into the details about that. It delayed our return in Santa Fe by a day, so we left Ojai on Wednesday night and got back to Santa Fe Thursday around noon. Then Ben shovelled out the driveway so we could park the car, and we proceeded to do the same thing we always do when we get back from a trip...spend two days crazily rearranging the house and cleaning. We had to buy another bookshelf (we have five now) and found a place to put a TV Ben's dad gave him. Things like this, in a space as small as ours, generally mean moving everything around until it fits again. Santa Fe cured me of the flu, and I've spent the last three days (quite literally-almost all of the daytime) reading Brothers K. I have seminar in a couple of hours, and I am prepared, and I am dreading senior essay writing. I will spend the next four weeks just writing about Jung, and if the final product sucks, I am going to be really disappointed. The really good news is that I am going to Taos to train to be a midwife. Ahhh...my strength is waning...this post is so long. Nothing really special happened surrounding my acceptance by the midwives. The short of it is that I'm going to spend the summer in Taos making some money and then start my apprenticeship in August. And it sounds like I get very little vacation. Ever. So, I'm glad this Christmas was so nice, guys!