He works hard for his money so you better treat him right...

Today was my first day of work.

I woke up at about 5:30, showered, ate PBJ for breakfast, then made a couple of shots of espresso before I was out the door on my bike to the Covina Metrolink station. $10 round trip to and from Union Station.

After I arrived at Union Station it was a quick walk down the way to "Patsauoras Transit Center" where I caught the #10 express Big Blue Bus to Santa Monica. $1.75 one way express bus to Santa Monica on a nice, clean bus. If you've never been on the Big Blue Bus do yourself a favor - they are dreamboats.

I biked two or three blocks to my destination: 7th and Wilshire. The lot that I am attending to is a private lot for employees and clients of primarily Asylum Visual Effects. They are apparently big players in the digital effects market. There is also a hearing aid place for transparent skinned, overly rich, senile senior citizens and a high end salon called Aya. Teknion is in the same building as Asylum but I have no idea what they do. Basically I make sure that the people coming in are supposed to be there and that people that aren't supposed to be there are not coming in.

There was a lot of downtime on the job. I had a good, long chat with my uncle for most of the day since he was there showing me the ropes. However, when I'm there by myself I'll be able to do a lot of reading. I get to read a lot on the train and the bus. Today I burned through about 1/3 of the ethnolinguistics book Jenni gave me. The book completely fascinates me. This is the first real text I have read that goes into depth about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is what drew me to linguistics in the first place.

One of the perks of this job is that I have access to the amazing food that Asylum puts out. They have good coffee and this and that for breakfast, and a full lunch buffet in the afternoon. Nice... another perk is that I'm working for my uncle under the table, so this job of mine doesn't impact my financial aid for the school year after this.

My schedule is looking good. For this week I am working Tues.-Thurs., but for the weeks after that I will work Mon.-Wed. Four days off in a row is not bad at all - my schedule will allow me to plan plenty of adventures. In fact... if I wanted to take a train somewhere, I could take the bus to Union Station after work and catch a night train to my destination...

Another good thing: I'm close to UCLA and there are plenty of busses I can take that'll take me directly to UCLA from Santa Monica. Yes, Jenni...