The South

So, here I am, in lovely North Carolina, and let me tell you, its the south.  There are some fun things about the south that are new to those of us who have lived in the midwest and west, and technically new england and california, but not the south.  Its not so far as culture shock, but there are definitely some new things.

- sweet tea to be found everywhere.  In restaurants, the cafeteria at the hospital, and provided at every free meal I have yet attended.
- people say sir and ma'am, and are generally polite.  I have not yet noted any aggressive passing on the roads.
- the accent; I have to be careful to not accidentally start mocking it
- BC powders.  I learned about this the other day - its little packets of tylenol, aspirin and caffeine in large quantities that people take on a regular (8-9 packets a day) basis if feeling poorly.  Apparently good for what ails you.  Unless what ails you is an ulcer, then you're in trouble.
- employees at stores are extremely helpful, frequently asking if you need help when you weren't even looking confused.  Not nearly as aggressive as in Greece, but still variably helpful.  At the hardware store I appreciate the heck out of someone asking me if I need help, since I don't go often enough to know where to find stuff.  Not so much at the drugstore.  Its still nicer than having to track someone down if you really need to ask something, only to have them act like its just not their job to help customers....

This window, right next to my bed, looks out into my neighbor's backyard.

In other news, I got some stained glass looking window clings for a few key windows that don't need to be looked in or out of.  Tentatively they look quite nice.  One of them, a new design from the company they came from, even incorporates texturing, making it a pretty impressive fake.

I learned recently that you can almost, but not quite, get dark grey wood stain out of a white carpet.  Oops.  Its just two lonely drops, but still, I was kind of hoping I could make them go away.

I also learned about using your power lines in your house to run your internet signal through; you have two little boxes that plug into outlets, one near your router, which you hardwire into the router, and the other into a outlet where you need more wireless signal.  The second one acts as a second router, rebroadcasting your wireless signal.  It took some doing to get the security set up, since the utility for that doesn't play nice with macs, but once I got it set up, we're good to go.  Now I have good signal everywhere in my house, and likely on the deck.  And it wasn't any more expensive than any of the other options for extending your wifi.  There is one interesting side effect; there is a lamp in the upstairs bedroom that turns on and off by touching the base.  After I got this setup, it decided to be on all the time.  I had to unplug it to get it to turn off.

I also got chromecast in the mail; a $35 little do-hicky that plugs into the back of your TV (not my TV, technically, but hey, it lives here) and lets you stream video directly to your TV from netflix and youtube, other services coming soon.  It uses your phone or computer or ipad as a conduit, that's where you control it from, but it doesn't monopolize your device or wear down the battery.  Pretty cool.  On a similar note, I finally womaned up and got my own netflix account; I've been borrowing someone's for the past several years due to tight finances, but now that I've got a real job, I figured I should suck it up...


:)