Traveling, home

Had a pretty interesting conversation with Mike at the marina. I was telling him about the completely appealing cottage in the forest that I visited yesterday, and he was telling me about his impatience for the end of June, when he will be free from his lease and able to leave for his van trip around the country with his dog. I egged him on by saying he doesn't have to wait for the lease to be up as long as he has already paid the rent. Of course, that goes against the grain a bit to pay for rent for a place unless he is living there, but then it goes against the grain to keep living there when he wants to be going, doesn't it?
Anyway, listening to him talk about how confined he feels in a house and how much he wants to loosen his ties to other people, be a bit more disconnected, made me feel a bit better about not having done anything toward my daydream of traveling around with my dog. 'Cause I don't have a desire to get disconnected; I'd rather be increasing the number of connections I have with other people, even though I don't want to get overly entangled with anyone either.
I have a significant yen for home, which I think will require me to plunk down somewhere and stay there for a while, get tangled up with a particular area. I don't think I want to do that in Oakland. Would rather do that in a woodsy part of Northern California. Preferably close enough to Rachel and Ben to see them fairly frequently.
That would narrow my options, which is good, but the remaining options look difficult. Housing is expensive everywhere in California, and the more beautiful parts are no exception, even though there are no jobs in those parts :) So here I am having found this wonderful place to live, but the rental cost is almost twice as much as I'm paying now to share a place with a guy who keeps his shit in heaps all over the house. (Much rather he'd get it together and put it in his own room). I have some fantasies about how I would generate some income in an out-of-the-way place such as Guerneville, but don't know how realistic my fantasies actually are with rent being as high as that.

And this afternoon I took an employment test at Berkeley Unified School District.