Life in CT - Part 1

Whenever I'd tell a company that I live in North Carolina, they would immediately associate my home with the Andy Griffith show. While it is true that a lot of NC is quite rural, I used to live in Raleigh, the capital city, which ends up being a little different than the rest of NC. I always liked Raleigh because it gave me most of the amenities of a big city, without the negative features of a big city (lots of traffic, lack of trees, unreasonably high cost of living). The move to Connecticut actually put me in a much more remote-feeling area than back home in NC, which is not what you'd think by looking at the names of the two states.

Yale is in New Haven, but living in New Haven isn't exactly the best idea in the world. So we live about 15 minutes north of New Haven (off I-95N) in a town called Branford. I call it a town because it is most definitely a town. Branford is one of those towns where it seems small enough that everyone knows each and every other person in the town very well, which is a big departure from where I used to live.

The town itself is extremely quiet, the speed limit is about 25 mph throughout the entire town which has already done a lifetime of eroding my driving patience, especially when driving behind someone who strictly adheres to the speed limit :)

We're renting a house up here in a nice little subdivision, I met a total of two of our neighbors, both of which seem very nice. A neighbor down the street has had his TV on ever since we moved in at the beginning of September (I kid you not); regardless of what time of the day or night it is, his TV is on. The subdivision is extremely quiet, so I make an effort not to make too much noise driving out in the mornings/evenings.

We're pretty close to a grocery store, a gas station and, you guessed it, a Walmart, but that's about it. It's absolutely crazy to go to the Walmart here; I went to go buy the Star Wars DVDs at around 9:30AM when they came out and I swear the entire town was at the Walmart. Finding parking there is like movie theater parking back in Raleigh. In terms of getting to any stores that would actually interest me - the closest Best Buy is three towns over, and it takes a good 45 mins to an hour to get there and back, so I tend to not leave the house too much.

The one thing that absolutely boggles my mind is a very strange phenomenon I've noticed up here: people love to leave their shopping carts all over the parking lot. Wherever you go, as long as there are shopping carts in the area, they will appear in the parking lot in parking spaces, in the middle of the isle of cars, toppled over, grouped together with 4 or 5 other carts, etc... I've never seen it this bad...ever. I used to live in New Hampshire and I didn't remember this until I asked my parents if it was ever this bad up there, and they reminded me that the grocery stores up there required a $0.25 deposit to get a shopping cart, which was refunded when you put your cart back where you got it from - I think I understand why. I would say that maybe it's just that people don't like putting carts back when it's freezing outside, but we moved here in September, and it was far from freezing in September.

The roads here are absolutely horrible for any sort of spirited driving. I always used to take the term "nice country roads" for granted, since I just assumed that all places had these wonderfully remote stretches of curvy roads where no one else drove - I guess that's not quite as common up here in the densely packed North East :)

Despite my complaints, I don't mind living up here too much as a temporary thing. I kind of like the quietness of the area and with basically nothing else to do around the town it's not too hard to focus strictly on work :)

I'm going to have to cut this one short as I've got a ton of benchmarking left to do for my second Half Life 2 article, but I'm going to try to chime in with random tidbits from life in CT as much as I can.

Take care