Should have rented a truck and moved it ourselves.

If you need to move, do not under any circumstances, use National Van Lines. Today is the last day our stuff was scheduled for delivery. We finally got a call from them and our stuff is still sitting in a warehouse in Colorado. It is now scheduled for delivery Sunday and Monday. So, I'll be at work when the truck arrives, more than likely. They also raised the price by about 15% for no reason that has been satisfactorily explained to me. They also had the gall to ask for payment today. They'll get paid when the deliver our stuff, after we have checked it against the manifest and inspected for damage. They will not get a penny before that. Unfortunately, that means I'll have to pay with a cashier's check if they deliver on Sunday and can't put it on a credit card because their office is not open on Sunday. At least that means I won't get nailed with high interest rates by paying it off incrementally, but this will wipe out my savings. I also have no intention of paying the increased cost. So this is 4-5 more nights of sleeping on the air mattress, which is already not agreeing with me. I'm tempted to call them up, cancel the contract, fly back to Colorado, rent a truck, and drive it here myself. It would probably be quicker and definitely cheaper. We would have saved a lot of hassle if we'd done that from the beginning. I would rather their warehouse burned down so we could collect the insurance money and replace it.

Driving

Got me a California Drivers' License today. It's a bit more involved than in Colorado. As I recall, when I moved to Colorado, I went down to the Drivers' License Office (there's no centralized DMV), showed them my VA license and said "Yo. I wants one o' them fancified CO licenses." And they're all "Pay me!" And I'm like "K." and they handed me the new one.

Here I had to dig out my birth certificate, bring that in, pay them, take the eye exam, get my thumbprint and picture taken, take the written test, and then get a card saying Interim License and a promise that I'd get the real one in 3 to 6 weeks. WTF?

Taking the written test was a bit inconvenient, but I support the idea. I think that everyone ought to have to take it AND the practical test every year. This is impossible due to lack of resources of course. And they should be harder to pass. This would of course result in a higher failure rate and fewer licenses issued. I got 34/36, which is good enough, but I'd have failed me for that. If I got 2 questions wrong, what the hell else don't I know? If you get behind the wheel, you damn well better know what you're doing. The average citizen is simply not qualified to operate a high-speed, high-mass chunk of metal in a populated area. I'd really rather have extensive training for professional drivers, and have far fewer of them. In this country, this will never work of course. People have to drive in order to get around, since public transit in this country sucks. RTD in the Denver area is (I'm told) the best mass transit in the country and I consider it barely adequate. I'd love to take the bus to my job at UCSC, but that requires me to take three different buses each way.

The next challenge is, of course, to see if our car passes the CA smog test. It passed a CO emissions inspection in January, but CA requirements are much stricter. Not sure what we'll do if it doesn't pass. We've ordered a Prius (which will meet the standards), but have no idea when it will arrive. Should be less than a month now.