Settling In

At first, I wasn't too sure about my apartment here in Carlsbad. I walked in with Leslie, who'll be my coworker and kind of my boss at the lab (she manages the interns and does a bunch of chemical analysis stuff) and we saw this kinda dirty place with a wobbly bed, evil-looking mold growing on the window, and a beaten-up closet with a shower curtain hiding some machinery and plumbing stuff in the back.

Now I've gotten things cleaned up a bit, and Karl the apartment manager fixed the bed and brought me a microwave (and claims he'll kill the mold with bleach tomorrow), and pretty much everything works (except for some reason the washer won't start on the "colors" setting - but works fine on "whites" or "knits/delicates"). I traveled down to the Walmart a couple of times now, and I've got sandwich supplies and frozen chicken nuggets, which should last me for a little while before I have to learn to cook. The only major thing I have left to do today is set up my bedroom a bit - move the bed, dresser, and night table around to my liking and then put the sheets on the bed...or at the very least, move the bed so my head won't be directly under the moldy window tonight.

If you're starting to panic from my cynical descriptions and thinking "OMG Diana's living in the ghetto and she's going to DIE!" - STOP. First of all, this is not the ghetto. It might seem a little shady, but it's not the ghetto. And second, I can't beat my MSE classmate Tori who actually DID live in the ghetto of Houston or some other big Texas city, and has some interesting stories about it.

There are elements of the apartment that I might call "kinda ghetto" - the mysterious shower curtain hiding the water softener or whatever's back there, for instance - but it's actually pretty nice. There's road noise, but it's quiet enough so it's just white noise, like having a fan going in the background. There's internet, slow but functional. There's even a washer and dryer that work pretty well as long as you don't try to dry too much stuff at a time. There's a TV with a built-in DVD player, there's air conditioning that works really well, there's a fridge and microwave and sink and bathroom and shower and a really big closet. I still have a lot of cleaning and unpacking and organizing to do, but I've got tomorrow and the entire Memorial Day weekend for that. Oh, and there's also a spider living in the corner near my front door, but it doesn't seem very evil at all. I told it that if it eats the bugs I won't squish it. :)

But now, because I haven't adjusted to Mountain Time yet, and because I've had a
long day, I think I'll go fight with my bedroom now so I can go to bed eventually.

PS: If you want to send me stuff, email me or bug me on facebook and I'll give you my address. But you'll have to wait to send it until I have the key to the mailbox thing.