Jim and I paired up to get an apartment. Now, finding an apartment in Berkeley is not extremely hard, finding the right apartment, now that's a bit of a challenge. You can get various leads from apartment listing, especially the one that UCB Housing runs. A common and illegal practice was finder's fees. Basically bribes paid to the apartment complex manager in the form of finder's fees. We refused to do that, for monetary and ethical reasons. We looked at individual rooms to let to apartments to sharing a house.

Eventually though, somehow we found a nice apartment on Oregon Street, at the corner of Oregon and California (coincidentally, only a couple of blocks from where Donald lives on Julia). $500 a month and it had a gated entrance and a laundry room and even an apartment parking lot, though neither of us had cars. A basic two bedroom apartment on the ground floor, next to the street (though that was never a problem, it was a quiet yet rundown part of Berkeley).

I remember my first weekend there. It was a week before school started and Jim hadn't moved in yet. All my stuff was piled up. Electricity wasn't going to be turned on until Monday so it got dark quickly and I couldn't cook anything. I remember making dinner by running hot water from the tap and making instant noodle soup, with some cheese chunks thrown in for flavor.

Sometime this year I bought a Macintosh IIsi from $3000 my uncle gave me when we went to Peru that very summer. That barely covered the computer (I got the better 5/80 configuration) and monitor and keyboard. Dad bought me a 2400 baud Apple modem so I could dial in to school. That was a cool computer. Color, running System 6.07. I named my hard disk Starbase 1 and I would log into BMUG and download everything I could at 800 KB and hour. Heck I even dialed up a couple of BBSs and posted some stuff. For some reason I created a Wally the Wombat character, probably because Steph had given me a stuffed Wally the Wombat.

Jim had a television and VCR. We quickly found out that the cable was still working. I guess the cable company hadn't turned it off. We saw a lot of cable and I got hooked on MTV and ESPN until the cable was turned off a few months later. I'd always wanted to watch MTV (but my parents never have bothered to get cable) and it was great. Same for ESPN -- now I could watch random sports shown late night on ESPN like Lacrosse and Rugby. I remember watching The Flash with Jim in its one season. A very well done show in a noir style, with John Wesley Shipp as the hunky speedster and I don't even remember the female lead (look it up on IMDB -- that's right, Amanda Pays from Max Headroom). Mark Hamill appeared in a couple of episodes as some sort of jokester villain. I remember Jim watch Northern Exposure reruns late at night, and Doctor Who. That's when I started watching Northern Exposure. Jim had a habit of recording a program even while he was watching it, which actually comes in handy if you miss a something and want to see it again during the commercial break (precursor to the Tivo :-).

We lived about a quick 20 minute walk from the Berkeley campus. Most days I'd just walk to campus and spend the day there, since it was too much trouble to walk back in between classes. In fact I tried to bunch my classes so I wouldn't have too much downtime. I'd walk to thge bus stop and if there was a bus right then I'd use it to get to campus, but usually there wasn't so I'd keep walking. Twenty minutes to the edge of campus but thirty minutes to the Engineering and Science areas. I got a lot of exercise.

Jim and I had a couple of all-night talks which I really enjoy. Just talking about life and our histories. He talked about Fremont High, which had four campuses and 10 000 students (an unbelievable number to me -- my own Hiram Johnson High School had a bit over 2000 students and we were one of the largest high schools in the Sacramento area). Back then he really wanted to be a physicist and travel to conferences and even the Soviet Union. Totally high-level stuff to me.

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