As I'm scheduled to be on this project for at least four weeks (and as I suspected, talks with others here indicate that that time period could be doubled or tripled. Shudder), they've set me up in corporate housing. I've a twenty minute drive down the freeway - luckily against traffic there and back - to where I get to stay.

The complex is large, but has no map anywhere easily accessible for which building is which. The leasing office closed at 5pm, so by the time I got there at closer to 7pm, I had nowhere to turn for questions. Because it is a gated community, getting any further than the front visitor's parking lot requires a gate remote - a remote that was sitting on my dining room table when I finally did find my apartment, so thus did me absolutely no good trying to get in to the apartment complex in the first place. I was reduced to squeezing between a gap in some bushes, weighed down with suitcase and computer bag before I spent the next fifteen minutes muttering Unkind Words about the obscure numbering schema used to completely confuse any newcomer into being nearly unable to find anything.

They put a lock box on the door with the key, but situated such that in order to extract the key, the door would have had to have been open. I finally managed to twist it around and slam it enough that the key slid out of the slot anyway, but not for any lack of swearing on my part. I at least was lucky in that there was still enough light (dim though it was) for me to at least see to put in the lock box combination. A coworker was not so lucky and ended up having to turn his car around and shine his brights toward the door in the hopes of getting enough light to actually see the tiny little numbers so he could extract his key.

The apartment floor slopes so severely that the drawers in the end table near the bed refuse to stay closed. I shut them, only to have them slide open again, as it leans too far forward. The mirror on the bureau also looms forward a bit alarmingly. that you do not have yet because it's sitting in your apartment, should you even be able to find it in the first place. I find it amusing that the furniture and decorations in this apartment are identical to that in the corporate apartment in which I stayed last time I was down here. I suppose somewhere this rental agency must have a huge warehouse full of rows and rows of identical couches, fake plants, and cheap pine bedroom furniture.