Today California, Tomorrow the World!

As my departure for France draws ever near, I'm taking this last opportunity to go with my parents on one of their many trips to La Verne, California.  The GPS on my camera says the hotel is in Pomona, but technically La Verne is where my dad is teaching and my mom is taking classes to get her doctorate degree.  Mostly the classes are online, but my parents still have to fly out west every now and then for real face-to-face classes, and this time I came with them.  It is my first time to California, and the weather is absolutely perfect!  It's about 75-80º, sunny, and just humid enough for me.  Of course, I'm not sure how much the way I feel about this place is affected by the fact that I'm still taking very strong pain relievers from my wisdom teeth extraction.  But the agonizing pain of dry socket is finally starting to fade, and I'm enjoying my time here despite the pain and difficulty eating anything very chewy.

The view from our hotel window

I have slept late every morning I've been here, which is very nice.  The hotel where we're staying feels very luxurious to me.  And because the University of La Verne puts my dad in this same hotel every time he comes, we get breakfast for free, and it's a nice breakfast; they take you to a table and sit you down, and give you coffee and orange juice, and then you help yourself to a hot buffet.  Then I usually spend the morning lounging in the room reading on my kindle which used to be my dad's (many happy faces :D :D), and later daddy picks me up for lunch in the bright blue Ford Focus we rented. 

After lunch, I usually sit with my mom in her classroom reading my kindle again while they do things like the hokey pokey, personality tests where they put shapes in certain orders, and figure out what colors their auras are.  Later in the afternoon, my dad goes back to the hotel to grade papers or to go to a meeting, and I go with him.  Once I sat in on a faculty meeting where they sat on a balcony overlooking L.A. at night and ate champagne and cheese and discussed the marketability of goat mugshots.  I had root beer instead of champagne.

All in all, my visit to La Verne has been very nice so far.  Hopefully I will be able to visit some graduate schools here; weather-wise this would be a wonderful place to stay, although I hear the cost of living is quite high.  There are some good schools around here though.  But California is my first in a long series of new places I shall visit this semester.