Fuck, there is still so much stuff to take care of… but, I’m leaving.

By the way, if you ever find yourself relocating, stick to a major city. Whenever I mention San Jose, people just seem to lose any concept of geography. In conversation, I think people have decided I was heading anywhere and everywhere between Baja, Mexico and Oregon. Folks in the Northeast just got no idea about the west.

Here’s an extremely basic California primer.

San Diego is way south, near Mexico. It’s an easy day trip to Tijuana.

LA is huge (especially the county) including famous places like Hollywood, Beverly Hills and East L.A. It’s still in Southern California, but it’s north of San Diego.

In between LA and San Diego is Orange County, aka “the O.C.” That general vicinity is also what people are talking about when they say “the Valley,” as in Valley Girl.

There’s stuff in the middle of the state, like Santa Barbara and Fresno and Bakersfield, where you don’t want to go to McDonald’s, and Sacramento, the state capital.

Then, there’s Northern California, where I’m headed and where “Silicon Valley” and San Jose are located.

One of main features of the area would be the giant, much larger than any bays in Massachusetts, San Francisco Bay. It’s why it’s called the Bay Area.

It’s really, really big, though, so it’s not like say Boston Harbor, where you could walk from Neponset on up around the Mass Bay to like East Boston or something if you were so inclined in about a day.

It’s big enough for the Golden Gate Bridge, which is bigger and redder than anything we got here.

So, people talk about “the Bay Area” and then various towns around the bay by where they are located. San Francisco is right on the bay, Berkeley and Oakland are “East Bay,” wine country, like Sonoma and Napa valleys are north of the bay, Palo Alto, home of Stanford U. and kind of the start of the tech area and Silicon Valley is “South Bay.”

If you follow Silicon Valley southeast from Palo Alto you hit San Jose, which is inland and pretty near the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

If you stayed on the coast and went south, you’d hit Santa Cruz, where surfers and banana slugs come from. Below that on the coast, is Monterey and Big Sur and all those famous literary/hippie places to watch the surf.

So, I’ll be near San Francisco, but not in it. And I won’t be anywhere near, LA, Hollywood, San Diego, Mexico or Alaska.

Why did I waste time writing this out?