I live in North Dakota now! It’s weird!

I’ve been here for about a month and a half and it’s starting to feel like “home” even though I’m having a hard time calling it that?! Like, every time we’re out somewhere I say, “Are we heading back to the house now?” or whatever and if I talk about L.A. I say “home” — so that’s a thing.

But regardless of what I call it, the house is very comfortable and we have furniture and stuff put away and we’ve been unpacked for almost a month and just bought the last piece of furniture we needed for our living room, so that’s wonderful. We still need to buy a bed/frame and boxspring, but that’ll happen eventually and until then I guess we’ll continue to survive with a mattress on the floor like some sad college sophomore that lives with eleven other guys. 27 is too old to get up from THE FLOOR every morning! The noises my joints make! YOU WOULD FIND THEM ALARMING.

North Dakota is weird and very small (comparatively) and there are SO MANY grasshoppers/katydids/cricket creatures EVERYWHERE which are the kind of bug I am the most afraid of so that’s been great. Also, our neighbors are pretty rude?! So that North Dakota nice thing seems like a lie. Although everyone kind of waves at each other when we pass on dirt roads, so… I don’t even know where to go with it. The lesson, I think, is that there are some nice people and some shitheads everywhere, no matter what. People are terrible! Shocker.

Other Things: no one has backyard fences, construction sites are just littered with totally theftable shit at all hours whether people are there or not and there is never security, oil drilling in the Bakken produces a LARGE byproduct of natural gas, but there’s only so much that can be harvested/contained so all the oil sites have these things called flares which are either large holes in the ground or giant potbelly stove looking things that are just ON FIRE all the time, there are dirt roads that you just have to drive on to get to places sometimes, almost no one is from here and the people who are don’t seem all that enthused about the people who aren’t, food is EXPENSIVE, there are almost no chains whatsoever for anything including food and consumer goods, Hardee’s is NOT like Carl’s Jr. no matter what anyone tells you, Pita Palace is the bomb, milk tastes better here just like it did in Kansas City, most stretches of the “freeway” (it’s… not… a… freeway…) are only 2-4 lanes total, we pick up our mail from one of the local radio stations, Frank’s/3 Amigos is also The Bomb, there is only one theater in town and it’s not a chain, Canada is REALLY close, and nobody can drive worth a shit.

WHEW let me tell you it’s been a weird month. » more: welcome to nodak