When it rains in California...

... It's impossible to see the lines on the road. That's a fact. I experienced it last night driving home from work. AND when you can't see the lines in the road it's very difficult to gauge your distance from cars in front of you. The two shouldn't really be related, but somehow they are... either that or I just can't drive, which, is an accusation I contest because I sat and passed my driving... oh yes!!!! I kept putting it off because I had the fear of failing because we all know it took my 5 times in the UK. Well, apparently the US test is no where near as difficult. I sat my written test at the end of September and only got 3 questions wrong. Yeah. I'd stayed up super late the night before studying the handbook, and I'm glad I did, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to answer questions like the allowance of alcohol in the blood, and other such wonderful things. Jon's getting fed up with me calling out 'illegalities' of other drivers while on the road. It's fresh in my mind, so I will pass judgement. If you're driving next to me I will judge you. I have failed to mention that before sitting the written test I got in such a mess that I was dry heaving and filled with pure anxiety the entire night before and morning of. I seems like my panic, anxiety and worry is getting worse with age. It seemed to level off for a while, but now it's back and worse than ever. Just the other day I woke up feeling alright, and immediately decided that I should be worrying about something, but couldn't remember what I should be worrying about. I still proceeded to worry about nothing. That's because I'm awesome. Sooooooooooo. Last week Jon and I went to disneyland. Heck Yeah... It was insanely fun and I was pretty sad to leave because in Disneyland nothing is real and reality doesn't exist and there's no worries.... 'forget about your worries and your strife?' yes please. It was insanely good. It was nice to spend time with boy man... because I love him.... go figure, who would have thought. And it was very nice to see him happy. Oh how happy he was. We brought the dog with us as well, and took her to the beach on Friday and Saturday of last week. The most expensive beach trip ever because when we pulled up at Newport beach (my used to be favourite) there was a man, and ENGLISH man, I must add, at our parking meter and he was under the illusion that it was his and he shared his rationale with us, which led us to believe that he was correct and so we paid in the meter this man had worked out was ours... when we returned to the car we had 15 minutes left and an old man in a hawaiian shirt was hanging around, he was in fact a parking attendant and he was, in fact, issuing us a ticket, we didn't know that's what he was up to because we still believe we had fifteen minutes, then he smugly presented us with a ticket and we immediately protested and explained and he watched us walk to the wrong meter and check the time, but he couldn't care less because I think to be a parking attendant you have to turn off every iota of compassion that makes you a human being, and become something else entirely: a robot, machine, alien, cow bag? I don't know which he was, but he clearly could see we made a mistake, and he clearly couldn't care less that we are all trying to live in a society and not just screw everyone over. We took photos and plan to contest because we paid with debit card (fancy Newport beach), so hopefully the contesting will result in not paying... Either way it was a fun beach walk with the puppy face, the price is yet to be determined though. We also took the dog face to Griffith Observatory and it was SOOOOO BUSY... welcome to LA on a Saturday.... we walked about 2 miles to get to the actual trails from where we parked... okay I exaggerated a little, it was more like 1.5 miles. It was far. Needless to say the dog was pretty tired. Success! If I can drain her of 10% of energy I feel like it's a grandiose achievement. Speaking of the tiny terrible terrapin, she just went through the bathroom bin and I had to pry her mouth open and remove several pieces of tissue that were stuck to the inside of her mouth where they had adsorbed all her mouth moisture. Wonderful dog. Back to LA. We decided to stay until Sunday (we were there Tuesday-Sunday last week), but finding hotels that are dog friendly is hard and easy. Easy if you don't mind staying in 1 star places in weird locations, for anyone's record La Quinta is definitely the best dog friendly hotel we stayed at. We didn't brace motel 6, although I've heard they are wonderful. One place to definitely avoid is Rodeway Inn in Caustic near Valencia... Although if you thoroughly enjoy feeling like your car is going to be broken into, stripped, or stolen, then this is your paradise. We were up from 3am and every 20 minutes after hearing obnoxious gang-esque conversations right outside our door. At first it wasn't apparent that the guys were staying there, they were on their phones, yelling at each other, and generally being loud and angry sounding. They also decided that it would take them 40 minutes to back their car into a space and turn the engine off, all outside out window, they also had someone sleep in the car... that's my only rational theory... because nothing else would explain why they kept turning their car engine on every 20 minutes for 10 minutes. Loud engine too. Lesson learned and lesson to all. If you want to 'get a head start' on your drive from LA to Sac Town, go the other side of the mountains, because Caustic is not worth the anxiety. I'd take night driving through the mountains any day. So I'm actually sick face this weekend. I woke up yesterday morning with weird lungs. That feeling like there's too much mucus in them. And by last night I had a sore throat. I'd had a headache all week, but i'd put that down to body fatigue from Disneyland (we walked a lot). I spent all of last night watching season 3 of glee and moping on the couch. Today I slept until noon and I've been a cleaning monster since, I only took a break to eat some dry cereal and decided blog time was happening. Sorry for the lack of images... I need to get back to cleaning otherwise I'd spend another 30 minutes uploading and making pretty images. They'll come. I will do it. Promise. Why is it the flat can never EVER stay clean. It's always so filthy. I want to try and scrub the carpet today... who puts a cream carpet in a flat that has a doorway straight out onto the street. Filthy filthy. And there's puppy stains all over it too. Oh puppy. The weather this week has been Radiohead. Tis the season.