Huh? Wha?

I saw a lot of things, people, and places when I visited SoCal earlier this month that serve as poignant reminders of why I live where I live. Having been born and raised in SoCal - I became blind to the blatant fact that it's a desert. Devoid of much rainfall (incidentally, since the season had begun, there were zero inches of rain - that's July, August, September, and the beginning of October with NO WATER from the sky) and just, ...brown. I mean, brown is a nice color. The comforter on my bed, in fact, has brown in it. How do I love thee (brown) let me count the ways;

• love the look and smell of leather (think horse wear)


• in keeping with the horse theme - think horse - brown is a good color for a horse


• love the golden brown crisped skin of a roasted chicken


• brown shoes (a girl must have several different pairs of brown shoes - it's non-negotiable)


• otherwise a mystery is the brown that one cleans out of a barn. It went IN green. Go figure.

So, back to SoCal. You see, it took me living somewhere else for a year and a half to really realize how much I appreciate living somewhere else (where it is GREEN) (we'll talk about green later).

It does have it's good points - like....uh, ...no rainfall? Which of course is really helpful when you're having a picnic. Or outside at all. (was that a sentence?) Anyway, I once defended SoCal with a passion. And now, I jokingly and seriously say; you couldn't pay me enough to move back there. Oh, back to good points; okay...uh - close to shopping, close to beach close to mountains. But the trade-off is smog, traffic, mean people, brown-ness, and of course, the earthquakes and lovely Santa Ana Winds that set SoCal on fire every single year.(timely enough -those Santa Anas where whooping it up the day we flew back to NC - dust storm and all) Those that live in SoCal passionately defend it because - well, because they live there. I did too.

On the last Friday we were there we went with family to Disneyland and had a ball. A three-year-old is just prime for a day at Disneyland. He had a blast! And we didn't even have to rent a stroller, but we did have to take out a second on the mortgage to pay for it all (which makes me think of airports, and how they get away with charging $4.69 for 20 oz. of water. And we think gasoline is expensive?).

At the end of the day, after walking to the tram, and then walking to the car after the tram, I saw a VW exiting the parking structure. A Jetta, black, and shiny, and...IT WAS A GLI!!!! (those of you who know me, know that I'm a VW freak) Naturally, I turned to gaze at it longlingly, with fond memories screeching around every corner in my mind and then...

I saw the license plate.

It said;

HUH WHA

I found this extraordinarily amusing and laughed the whole way home. I miss my Jetta. And I have been known to say "Huh? Wha?" quite often as bad as my hearing was. It was the final chapter of SoCal for me, epitomized so well by 1. a car (out here, nobody cares what you drive) and 2. the Huh? Wha? was a reminder for me that living in SoCal was so fast, you scarcely had time to listen to anyone, let alone yourself.