Hey Jakey,

So we did wind up going to San Jose for a few days. We got back in last night around 9 or 10 pm.

We went to the beach on Thursday, armed with sandwiches and Orangina from Muzzie's Deli in Pescadero. It was really cold and you shivered alot and I don't think you had a very good time. We didn't stay long enough really for me to feel like I had adequately soaked in the entire ocean experience, but long enough to feel like I had touched base.

I picked up a lot of non-perishable groceries at the Asian supermarket in Cupertino, and about $100 worth of books at Recycled Books. I tried to spend as little time at your daddy's parent's house as possible, but my dog allergies flared up anyway, and I'm sitting here a day later, still puffy, sniffly and itchy, and trying to get their damn little kick-dog dander out of my system.

So here's the thing: you and I went to visit C at her new digs in old downtown Sunnyvale, then everyone in the office went out for lunch at Stoddards across the street. (You did wonderfully well, I might add, for your first real grown-up restaurant experience! Not a peep, and you fell asleep half-way thru...)

Anyway, C said I could come work with her anytime, and that she would actually hold off on hiring the new chick that she had interviewed just last week, if I would come back and work there.

It's a small design firm, just C and two designers and an office lady, and C's husband is in and out several times during the day. They've got a ton of clients and I think between C and her husband, they've got tons of business savvy and a lot of potential. It would be a super-fun office to work in, and no corporate drudgery hanging over our heads, no upper-echelon management monkeys. About the same money I'm making now, probably a little less. I would definitely like to work there, though.

This job that I have now holds no joy for me anymore. It's a shame, because it could really be an awesome job, under the right circumstances. But awesome hours and a miserly shred of creative control just don't do it for me anymore. I don't really consider myself a princess, but I definitely think I'm being taken advantage of here. I don't think that would happen if I worked with C. I think she would actually appreciate having me on board. And it would be so ... fun, working with friends. Imagine that, having fun on the job.

Never has work/happiness/life and life/happiness/work been laid out so black-and-white for me before. As much as you want to say that work is not your life, that it's the stuff outside of work that's supposed to make you happy, I've found that you spend so much time at work that you can't totally discount the impact that it has on the other parts of your life.

I'm happy here in our little slice of paradise, Jake. I love Gardnerville. I love the weather, I love living so close to the mountains and the Lake. This is where I got married, where I had you, basically where I became a real grown-up. But I loathe-loathe-loathe my job. I've been offered a job where I really think I could be happy and useful and appreciated. But I'd have to live back in the middle of the teeming mass of unwashed humanity that is the Bay Area. Can I be happy living there again?

There's a really depressing sight about halfway between Stockton and the Bay, right there beside the freeway, near Tracy. A housing development that's sprung up sometime in the last couple of years, kind of a bedroom community for the Bay Area. Right there in the middle of nowhere, all of it within spitting distance of the freeway. A massive, high-density grouping of condos filled with commuters. There's nothing there, Jake, no mountains, no water, no trees, just flat land all around as far as you can see. On the opposite side of the freeway, there's an outlet mall and tons of shopping, Starbux, movie theaters. No one could ever possibly look that area over and say, "Yeah, wow, *this* is where I want to live!" It's a "community" of worker bees, brought together by their need for low-cost housing and proximity to shopping. It makes me want to cry every time we whizz past on our way home.

That's the kind of place I see us living in if we leave here, sweetie. Not there specifically, but anything that we could afford in that area would be pretty damn similar.

Depressed now. Maybe I'll check in later with something cheerier. I love you!