Lots of people have asked how things are going, so I guess it's time for an update on the forum to answer all the burning questions of the day.

Most people ask "How is Denver?" Denver is brown. Everything in Colorado appears to be brown. The houses, the office buildings, the shops, the vegetation, and the landscape are brown. Many of the people are also brown. I want to go to a paint shop and see if it is legal to sell non-brown paint in this state. When I got here a week and a half ago, everything was mostly white with patches of brown; now it is mostly brown with patches of white.

The mountains are spectacular. If I didn't have the mountains to look at, I would go mental.

When I fill out forms to apply for jobs, they all ask my race. I have never, EVER had to tell people my race on a job application before. The fact that they all say it's so they can track their company's diversity record, or something, doesn't make me feel any happier about this.

People smoke in shops or other public buildings. You get asked "smoking or non-smoking?" in restaurants.

It is utterly cool being able to stick outgoing mail in your letterbox and THEY PICK IT UP AND TAKE IT AWAY instead of just delivering incoming mail. You don't have to walk to a post office or post box! How cool is THAT?

It is unbelievably cool being able to get a bus to almost anywhere in town, at almost any time of day, while still paying less than it would cost to drive there.

I have almost mastered the art of looking in the correct direction when crossing a road. I don't think I can say I *have* mastered it, because although I now remember to look in the correct direction, I still can't step into the road without every cell in my body screaming AAAAAH YOU'RE NOT LOOKING YOU'RE JUST STEPPING RIGHT INTO TRAFFIC AND WE ARE GOING TO GET FLATTENED BY A TRUCK ANY SECOND NOW and trying to force my head around to look in what always used to be the correct direction.

There is still no way on this earth I can cross at a major intersection until the pedestrian signal tells me to. Trying to figure out which lanes will be turning in which directions is like trying to do quadratic equations in my head.

I am still mostly just hanging around Dave's house during the day and applying for jobs. I haven't applied to very many yet, because I found a perfect one, which I am waiting to hear about. I am almost certain I will get an interview for that one. Because I've been away from "career"-type jobs for just over a year now, I feel that whatever job I get next is going to be important. It'll either get me back into higher-paid, interesting work, or it'll trap me way back where I was at the beginning of my working life, in clerical or support roles which could reasonably be done by a robot or one of the smaller primates. I've never been out of work for longer than a few weeks before, so now that it's been a week and a half, it's starting to feel really weird not having a job. However, I can afford to be without a job for a couple of months if necessary, so I'm quite determined not to just take the first one that comes along.

My mother emails me about four times a day. In the latest one, she emailed me just to say that I had received some junk mail from a credit card company. I emailed back to tell her to throw it away. I'm sure this brought a whole new level to the concept of spam.

Living here is GREAT and I've never been so happy. If you want to know all TEH MUSHY STUFF instead of what I've written about, I guess you can ask me in chat or memo me.

Brunnen-"not saying whether I'll answer"G