Cool. Post 'em up when you get the chance to ready them. I love checking out cool pictures from peoples travels. I have tons of cool pictures from Honduras, well, I think they are cool for those who never experienced turd world countries it is quite a shock to see how people live outside of the states. Actually, most of the world outside of the states and some modern countries in europe etc etc are **** holes.
Adobe (photoshop for me) is a ***** to learn, so many freaking menu's and effects to use and stuff to tinker with. I feel your pain there heh.
You like living in LA? Seems like such an expensive dump to live in... unless you are super wealthy that is where you can just ignore the problems and live it up. I have a good friend who I was in the service with, whos is always inviting me to come to San Jose and stay indefinitely, which I'm sort of tempted to, maybe get a high paying job at one of the tech places, but I figure it would be too rough, landing 100k there is like probably equal to making a measly 30k here in pa.
I even turned down a federal job in DC that paid 60k because it kind of wasn't enough to get a house, move the family into a NICE part of town, deal with the traffic, etc etc... 60k in pa is golden and in DC I would be basically barely above the squalor line.
Anywhere in your travels you would want to live... I mean that were nice enough and decent enough for an american to relocate to?
I don't love LA, but I like the neighborhood I live in. This isn't the place I'd pick to live if I had absolute freedom to do so, but I'm staying here for the interim mostly for health reasons. I need to live in a drier climate with quality healthcare and for travel purposes I need access to a major airport. As much as I'd prefer living somewhere much smaller and colder, there's as many downsides to anywhere I could move as there are here and the act of moving is not something that I exactly want to do, so for now I remain. All of the places that I'd want to live in this country come with major downsides for me...Portland, Seattle, and Pittsburgh are all too wet for my back to tolerate and I'd rather forfeit my citizenship than live in Arizona. I've had multiple doctors push for New Mexico, but that would make it more difficult to travel.
There are many places I'd love to relocate to outside of the country, but the downsides are just as plentiful as a unilingual writer with a ton of health problems whose only hope of getting a citizenship elsewhere would be to marry into it. I wouldn't be against that, but I don't exactly have anyone in Finland offering
Sapporo really struck me in my brief time there in Japan. Sapporo struck the perfect balance of what I'd want in a city to live in...but learning Japanese would be hopeless for me and Sapporo isn't exactly a desert (the massive difference in snow doesn't matter to me since snow is dry and doesn't bother me a fraction as much as rain or humidity does...but Sapporo also gets more rain than Pittsburgh so there goes that argument).
The biggest issue for me is just that there really are no perfect places for me. Ideally I'd be able to split the year between two places, but that's not exactly easily done. I want snowy winters and dry, cool summers. Spring/Summer in Iceland; Autumn/Winter in Montana has long been the completely unfeasible dream.
Cost of living will inevitably drive me out of LA if I'm going to be traveling a lot, rent and whatnot is just too high if I'm not going to be using it every day, but California is sadly saving me more in healthcare costs than it's robbing me with the other aspects of cost of living for the time being.
