It was supposed to rain all weekend in California, but it was absolutely beautiful instead. That was a very pleasant surprise.
Less pleasant was the surprise I had when I picked up my car at the airport and saw that it was covered in frost. I think I've been spoiled by our garage at home, but I don't own an ice scraper. Fortunately the folks at the parking lot where I left my car were nice enough to clear off my windshield, and a combination of the defroster, air conditioning, and a fan turned all the way up allowed me to see well enough to drive. Until I hit the fog, that is.
Just to make things more interesting, I turned on the radio and landed in the middle of a series of reggae Christmas songs, including such pieces as Eek-A-Mouse's The Night Before Christmas and something the DJ called "a Rasta Jingle Bells". I don't think I've ever heard anything quite like that before.
One of the more interesting bits of apartment-hunting was watching how the person showing us around at each place treated my roommate and me. I'll be rooming with Ruby, a good friend of mine from Stanford. Yes, that's "Ruby", which is a female name, and yes, that's "good friend", not "girlfriend".
Of course, you don't introduce yourself to someone who's trying to sell you an apartment by saying, "Hi, I'm Eric, this is Ruby, and we're Just Friends." But you'd think that when you mention that you're looking for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom place that perhaps they'd realize that they might not want to assume that you're sleeping together.
Invariably, though, whoever was giving us a tour would say, "Here's the master bedroom, and here's the guest bedroom." Even for apartments in which the two bedrooms were the same size. Grr.
Of course, none of that was as bad as the one apartment salesman (what do you call those people?) who didn't even look at Ruby the entire time. He never even introduced himself to her. When two people are looking for a place to live, you'd hope that both of them have some influence on the decision. Ignoring one of them really doesn't go over very well. That certainly dropped his apartment complex a few notches in our rankings. Of course, the fact that the place's floor plan didn't provide any place for a TV in the living room didn't help, either.
This weekend's apartment-hunting trip was an interesting contrast to the similar trip I took to Redmond a year and a half ago. Bay Area apartment rates have dropped since that time, but they're still rather high. And this time we had the challenge of trying to create a reasonable commute to two different employers, while last time things were easier with all three of us working at Microsoft.
After a day of searching, we settled on Archstone Willow Glen, which while not perfect, seemed to be our best option. They have a reasonably good location -- a ten-minute commute for my roommate and probably twenty minutes or so for me -- and a nice set of features along with affordable rates. The biggest drawback is that we'll be farther from Stanford than I'd like, but the closer we get to Palo Alto the more expensive (and smaller) each apartment becomes. So we'll stick with this for a while and see how it is. If it turns out that we can do better elsewhere, we can move again.