It's a year now since we drove to Los Angeles from Maryland, skirting the bottom edge of the 2014 polar vortex the whole way. (At one motel, it was so cold that the cardkeys didn't work.) A year and a few weeks. ........ Plus a few months. Like, eleven. But who's counting? I heard blogging is dead, anyway. We made it to the west coast in a new car with new phones and new apps. The last time I did the drive, all I had was the AAA 50 states road atlas and a box of tapes. We arrived with suitcases full of everything we didn't ship from Tokyo, a rocking chair for my brother, and a case of food poisoning that was just starting to fully blossom as we came out of the desert and straight into LA's evening rush hour. My job interview was the next morning. I got the job. We got married on the beach. We got an apartment west of the 405. This means we see friends who live east of the 405 only very slightly more often than we did when we lived in Japan. I would feel terrible about it except that this is a bona fide LA thing. Okay, I feel terrible about it anyway. Everything about LA is true - the kale, the yoga, the person at the next table talking about a screenplay. And always the cars: the traffic jams, the route you took to get here, the valet parking, the crazy other drivers. I found out that driving a car is not like riding a bike. I took a lesson soon after we got here to try to get used to the freeway. I asked the instructor what the secret was to not being intimidated by the high-speed carpool lanes that grind right up against the median. "Oh, I stay out of those lanes. Too scary," she said. Maybe I should have gotten a better teacher. It's pretty great, though. Coming up on two years, I'm starting to make some friends on my side of the freeway. (That's good, it's not meant to sound pathetic - it's hard to meet people!) Sometimes I can't believe my job as a TV producer is what I get to do for work - like when the assignment is to ride around and look for the vantage point with the best shot of a new city. Sometimes, less so. Like when I have to locate, say, a real estate agent who's willing to put a client's property on international television that day, before dark. We flew all the way to New Jersey one night with a ton of gear and had to come right back because the interviewee canceled first thing the next morning (her daughter was having emergency knee surgery). And the usual, occasional frictions of a cross-cultural environment. But I enjoy the travel and it is always a tremendous privilege to hear and share people's stories. So we're pretty settled. There's a restaurant where they recognize us when we come in, and an elderly neighbor we check on. We haven't gotten a ticket for leaving the car on the wrong side of the street in quite a while. Every time I color my grey hairs, I think maybe this time I got them for good, but they keep coming back. And I still haven't found a hair salon I like.