Lessons learned in downtown LA:

A Japanese noodle bowl place staffed entirely by Mexicans was my favorite place to eat. It was just a little incongruous to go in a restaurant labeled in Japanese script and hear only Spanish. It wasn’t the best place to eat when I was dealing with shaky hands though; I flung soup everywhere. After the first day, I chose it for dinner and took it to my hotel room so I could slop in private.

Something called a “beef” bowl at another nearby joint wasn’t good at all though. “Beef” is in quotations for a good reason. Yuck!

I was completely lost the whole time I was down there. Oh, I did get a sense of North and South after a few days, but I was still a fish out of water. I’d go to the class, and go “home” to my lonely cold hotel room, and then what? I couldn’t sleep, so I’d end up just lying awake on that rock-hard, scratchy-sheeted hotel bed for hours. I was only lucky in that the bottom sheets were fitted, so once I did end up falling asleep, I didn’t wake up all mummified.

And I missed Cowboy much more than our usual separation brings. Forty miles is nothing when I’m at home and things are all as they should be, but trapped in a strange place, it’s completely different. I’d got myself so lost getting there in the three-dimensional maze that is to LA freeway system, that for a couple of days, I didn’t even know in which direction to pine.

And that was another ridiculous thing; the freeways. I’m used to a commute that involves tractors and sometimes sheep, not miles after miles of endless “sheep,” zipping in and out of nonexistent spaces. I could not trust my sense of direction with three or four vertical layers of traffic. The one time I thought I saw an earlier exit for the road I was aiming for, I was completely and utterly wrong. I ended up in some little ghetto place, and when I tried to turn around, I ended up in a teeny tiny little neighborhood with streets just wide enough for one driving lane and two lanes of parked cars. How do people live like that?

After the first day, I just walked to my class. It was easier to walk the two blocks than to fight traffic and park in a structure that had maybe two inches of clearance above me. Then I’d walk to lunch, go back to my hotel room to eat and decompress, and walk back to class. Good thing I brought my tennis shoes, because my new boots were killing me.

The class itself was very interesting. I wasn’t the only woman in it this time, but I was the only independent contractor. Everyone else worked for water agencies or health departments. There were two people who’d flown out from a base in Turkey and one from New York. I had no idea that this class was as nationally known as it is; I was really lucky to find it practically in my own backyard. The people teaching it were largely the people who’ve written the manual that most of the country uses in their programs.

I learned a lot, but it was just enough to point out exactly how much I don’t know once I start actually doing the work. This course was geared towards cross-connection control surveys, much broader than just testing the assemblies. I’m going to have to bid on doing a survey for my business now, and I won’t know exactly how much to panic until I see the request for proposal and know exactly what they want.

The good thing is that I now see a job opportunity that I didn’t know about before. Even if my county doesn’t have a formal program in place, the state mandates that they need one, which means a potential job lurking somewhere for someone already trained in it, even if the business doesn’t really take off. This survey work isn’t going to be my bread and butter, but I need it for the one main job. I think I might be able to market myself to processing plants on that note as well.

So now, I get to sit and wait for my formal certification to come in the mail, and then I get to scramble to write a bid for a job that I’ve never done before. I’m confident that I can do a good job of it; the trick will be writing the proposal. But I’ve got a month or so before I have to worry about that. For now, I’m going to play with my kids and do some serious laundry. It’s good to be home.