1. Homemade food.
My father regularly makes salmon, turkey fajitas, teriyaki meatballs, vegetable stir fry, tuna pasta, and puttanesca (my personal favorite type of pasta). Not only will I miss the delicious variety of foods he makes, and the smells that regularly emanate from his kitchen, but I'll miss being his sous chef.
2. My friends.
A few of my close friends from high school are starting out at community college; one is at an acting academy, and returns to our hometown regularly; one is on the east coast for university, and my best friend is staying in Southern California to continue her education. I'll see most of my friends during holidays, but I have no clue how often I'll be seeing my friend on the east coast.
3. A bed without railings.
The beds at UCSC are nice, don't get me wrong, but having a loft bed there means I can't just roll out of bed. It makes the process of getting up in the morning slightly less enjoyable than it is when I'm in my childhood home.
4. Hours of silence.
The dorms that I'll be living in for the entirety of this school year are fairly quiet but every once and a while a door will slam or people outside will yell or generally just be very loud in the halls. In the evenings and nights in the house I've lived in for the majority of my life, my family typically would go to sleep before me and I'd have a couple hours of silence to collect my thoughts and do whatever needed doing before falling asleep. In college, there's no such thing as hours of silence.
5. Driving.
I really appreciate the public transportation in Santa Cruz, and there is still a great feeling of independence in the sensation of "I get to choose where to get off of this bus, I can walk anywhere I want," etc. Yet it's not equivalent to the freedom of being able to drive myself- I can't go as far on a single bus as I can on a single tank of gas, so I can't explore the areas around campus as much as I'd like to, unless I decide to walk over three miles.
6. Being able to walk barefoot.
Personally, I really enjoy having clean feet, so on campus in the dorms I can't exactly walk around without shoes much. Typically back in Southern California I could depend on my house or my friend's houses having clean floors but I can't make such assumptions in the dorms, so socks and shoes are obligatory for me.
7. Local restaurants.
I love the places I've been accustomed to eating out at for most of my life and I'll occasionally miss my favorite tacos and sandwiches from the restaurants near my parent's house, but after some research I'm sure I'll find places around downtown Santa Cruz that I can adapt to in place of my usual haunts.
8. Dollar stores.
Everything up near the coast costs so much more than things in my hometown, hence the lack of dollar stores. Farewell to the idea of five dollars for a toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, and soap; hello four dollar tubes of toothpaste.
9. Comfortable chairs.
There are comfortable chairs on campus, I swear. However, I can't exactly take my huge beanbag chair along with me to the dorms and sink into it at after classes- there just isn't room for it. The chairs in the dorms force me to hunch over my desk without any back support and they just aren't comfortable after a couple hours of trying to study in the quiet of the dorms.
10, Free laundry.
Laundry detergent is never free, but being able to use the washing machine and the dryer in my parent's house was. In college there's no such luxury: the washing machine costs a dollar per load, and the dryer costs seventy-five cents.
Despite this list of what I'll miss, I'm really looking forward to my future away from Southern California.
