a new home

Munchies for the road; all healthy of course!

As you can imagine by now, we made it out here on Sunday, March 2nd as we hoped.  This picture of our travel goodie bags from Coop's Aunt & Uncle said it perfectly; we were going to make it out to Maryland and beat the coming snowstorm or we were going to bust into a million small shards and give up.

We did beat the snow and Monday, my supposed first day at work in my new office, ended up my 3rd snow day since starting at my new job at the end of January.  Moving in winter taught me several things, most of which is that Mary-landers, as I am pretending they are called, don't understand what to do with snow while it's falling from the sky and more importantly, they are horrible-no-good drivers.  My apologies to everyone in Peoria AND the state of Wisconsin that I ever said jerky things about; you guys are freaking Formula1 drivers compared to all of Maryland. Folks born here even joke that everyone is very important and in a hurry out here and they are raised to think that way... so their driving, crossing the street as pedestrians, standing in line at the grocery store... all of these things suck worse here because everyone is special.

Also, I had heard when younger that no one cares if you're from Chicago and that is totally true.  When I started in the office and everyone wanted to know where I came from they say, "oh neat" and move along.  When a new person is from... Connecticut... not even a town that I have heard of there from some historical documentary or anything like that, people "ooo" and "ahhhhh" and know twelve family members who are from there.  New England is definitely another world and unless you're from here they just don't care.

I realize now that it sounds like I have only things to complain about here, but I actually do like it so far.  There's so much more in my neck of the woods to do that's accessible by walking... I haven't driven since I moved here... and that's super nice.  And there's a lot more to do than back in Peoria, IL which makes it all the more worth it.  I promise I have more to share and will write more interesting things now that I am done being a new person, at a new job, trying to figure things out with work.  My plan is to share with you my journey of finding out what it's like to be a nice Midwestern girl thrown in a world where everyone is someone, except me because I am from one of the biggest cities in this country that no one cares about.

P.S. I leave you with this funny picture below.  Short story--> One of my former GMs that I worked with at my old job went through a renovation and the hotel's nickname was "Barbie".  Upon completion of their renovation, I created this dolled up Barbie to commemorate the transformation and sent it to the hotel as a surprise.  On our move out to Maryland we were able to stay overnight at that very hotel and Ms. Barbie was there waiting to greet us in our room at 10 o'clock at night after driving all day long.  She was such a great sight to see and is a great reminder of all the cool and awesome people we can meet in our crazy lives along the way.

Love,

Beck

Ms. Barbie from West Virginia