I'm once again a complete person

Today I picked up my wife from LAX. She has finished her work in Denmark and has joined me in California to begin our new life together. With her here I feel whole again and we can now begin slowly building our lives in California together.

She has been on a long flight - I picked her up around 5 pm, which would be around 2 am in her head, and she was very exhausted from the flight. While I'm writing this I've allowed her to take a 2 hour nap before we go out to have something to eat. Fighting jetlag can be tough but my strategy when I arrived was to stay up till 11pm local time and get a good nights sleep after that. It worked like a charm and I will do my best to have her follow the same strategy. That way the jetlag should be over in a day or two.

There are lots of things we need to do over here - My employer pays for our housing and a rental car until August 20, and by then we need to find a rental and hopefully a car. Depending on where we end up we might not need a car to begin with. I love to ride my bike to work and I've done it a number of times already, but if we're more than 15 km away from my office we will most likely need a car. But to get a car I need a California Drivers License, and to get a Drivers License I need a Social Security Number, which should be arriving sometime next week - oh, and I also need to pass a traffic rules test and a driving test. That should be fun :)

Driving here is funny - most cars have automatic transmission, so it's like driving a gocart. It's also kinda boring not to do the shifting yourself but since you're spending most of your time in stop and go queuing it's less annoying to have automatic transmission. I still haven't found out what to do with my left foot and my right hand - most people solve this problem by texting away on their cellphones while driving, but I'm not a big fan of that ...

Yesterday I drove up in the Hollywood Hills to visit a friend of mine in one of the most scenic locations I've ever visited. His view was like the view Robert de Niro has from his house in HEAT - like a living ocean of lights before your eyes. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. I tried to take a picture, which doesn't do the view any justice, but check it out below. To get a better feeling check out HEAT in HD on a big screen - or even better: Come to Hollywood and visit me.



Tomorrow is Sunday where I haven't made any plans. The love of my live will decide what she wants to do and I will make sure she feels welcome from the start of her new life in California.