January 2006 Archives

This experience is actually what originally inspired our 'What's Different' segment. It's not that incredible, just a little amusing.

Over the holidays clear plastic noise barriers were being installed on the local highway connector, and for several weeks the normally two-lane road was closed down to a single lane. This resulted in the worst traffic we had seen in the area, consistently causing over a half-mile backup and a 10-15 minute wait.

However well before the lane actually closed people would stop using it, leaving a quarter- to a half-mile of open road. I'm not sure how much this actually added to the overall wait, but it certainly created a longer backup. Rather than use up the available space, the expectation according to local custom is that you should politely wait your turn like everyone else.

A small number of people would try to use the open lane to merge at the closure according to the rules, but they would get glared at and often blocked by the other drivers: basically the equivalent of someone driving on the shoulder of the highway to save time in a major metropolitan area.

So there it is: folks here are polite drivers, I'll say that for them.

Maybe I just wasn't looking for this in California (or "home" as I still call it) but here, it seems that either people are more desperate for crappy food or maybe it is just more available. I don't know.

Anyhow, we are sitting at a red light the other day and across the street is a Denny's and a KFC. It's probably around 9:30 am. I notice that there is a man outside the KFC apparently waiting at the door for them to open. He isn't an employee but he really wants to get into this KFC.

He can't need to use the bathroom or he would just walk to Denny's next door. Apparently he is just really jonesing for some KFC. He bangs on the door. Then goes to a window and knocks. Then back to the door.

Who needs KFC this bad at 9:30 in the morning? The stuff makes me sick everytime I eat it. But not this guy. We moved on and he was still knocking on the door. Does KFC even open that early? A random rant but I don't ever remember seeing someone trying to knock the door of a KFC down in Petaluma.

Or as I like to call it, 'The Little Magazine That Could'.

When we decided to move I processed the standard change of address form to foward our address to our Kingston rental. Our mail started arriving at the rental house two days before we were supposed to show up. Then when all hell broke loose and we didn't know where we were going I put a hold on the mail in Kingston until the end of November. All of these steps were easily done via the Postal Service website.

Once we decided that we were moving to Binghamton, I called the post office to see what I should do about forwarding our mail from both our Petaluma address and our Kingston address. They told me that I would need to fill out three separate change of address forms. One to Petaluma telling them to stop sending our mail to Kingston. One to Kingston telling them to send our mail back to Petaluma and a second form to Petaluma telling them to forward our mail to Binghamton. It was pretty confusing and I had the lady explain it to me a couple times before letting her off the phone.

After submitting these and waiting for three weeks without receiving any mail, I decided to call the Post Office in Petaluma to make sure they were sending our stuff along. Nope. In fact, they were still sending it to Kingston. So I decided to call Kingston. They were sending everything back to Petaluma. So I could just picture our mail being sent back and forth from coast to coast.

We finally found an online form that we could fill out (eventhough they told us not to) and started receiving our mail about a week and a half later.

So, today I received a copy of Real Simple magazine that had traveled around 8788 miles to get to me and I am still two issues behind. :)

After I posted the first 'What's Different' entry, I realized there was another way of looking at it; thinking of all my far-flung friends, what had changed in the ten years since we had lived in this area?

My distant friends are a good starting point. With a few exceptions, nearly everyone I knew has moved away; Brandie & I were here weeks before our first random encounter at the grocery store with someone I went to high school with. So far, I've randomly run into more people I went to high school with at the IKEA in Emeryville than at the Wegman's in Johnson City.

The university and area around it has grown, and there's rumor of other growth on the horizon, but a lot of the other areas have continued to decline. There are a few nice stores and restaurants scattered throughout the Triple Cities, but they're surrounded by empty storefronts and run-down buildings.

Speaking of restaurants, most of the stand-bys from ten years ago appear to have survived. Number 5, Cortese, even the Olive Garden on the Parkway are still in business and apparently unchanged. There are new places, including our favorite restaurant in town the Lost Dog Cafe, but they're usually small and very rare. Chains like Outback and Texas Roadhouse have also moved in, I guess like everywhere else. For local chains, I don't remember Nirchi's from my high school days but they're everywhere now.

Local radio has probably seen the least amount of change, not only the stations but also the playlists. 92.5KGB is still the only station regularly playing music from this decade.