Looking Back at a Strange Year

It was one year ago today that Rachel and I packed the cats in the car and started a 3000 mile move across the country and, frankly, away from everything we've ever known. Rachel and I are both west coasters through and through. Rachel technically lived on the east coast for a the first couple of years of her life, but since then she has lived in Oregon and Washington. I lived the the Puget Sound region for 39 years. Even when I was in Eugene, OR while in graduate school (the first time), I still had a permanent address in a Seattle ZIP code. The move was a tough one for both of us, and we've spent the past year learning, adapting, and settling.

News Summary
For those who may have missed out on a few things, here's a brief summary of the past year:

We left the Puget Sound region on the evening of July 31 for a quick five day drive across the country. The first few entries in this blog are daily entries made during that drive.

Rachel started the Astronomy PhD program at Yale at the beginning of September. She has done quite well: students are required to earn two "high honors" ratings in the classes they take (no grades for grad students at Yale) in the first two years. She has earned those two ratings already in her first year. She even got to Arecibo, Puerto Rico with one of her classes last fall, ostensibly to visit the radio telescope there. (They did, in fact, spend a lot of time at the telescope, but they also enjoyed a beach, some touristy stuff, and even a hospital ER. Everyone was fine after the ER visit; one of her classmates had a nasty allergic reaction but made a full recovery.) She is now working on the first of two required "mini" projects and in less than a year, she will be taking her qualifying exams. After passing those, she begins to work on her PhD thesis.

I started the Computer Science master's program at the University of New Haven (the other UNH) about a week later. I have also done quite well in my program, finishing the three trimesters with a cumulative GPA of 4.0 (five A+ grades and five A grades--three of those could have easily been A+ grades, but I chose not to do extra credit in those classes). I am currently working on my master's project, which is a database for the CS department to keep track of alumni. My advisor specifically thought of me to do the job because, as he admitted in a Freudian moment, he didn't want an "average" student putting this together for the department.

Rachel's work in the past year has consisted of being a TA for several classes. I have been working in the UNH Department of Institutional Research, first analyzing data, filling in surveys, and generally being bored, then more recently with writing code to automate many of those boring, repetitive tasks. I briefly believed that I was going to get a full-time job at Sikorsky Aircraft, who would pay for my school, but the economy shot that down. I then thought I would be a programmer on a cutting-edge new social networking site, but they have decided to do more fundraising and planning before starting work. I am also currently taking a forced two-week vacation from my work at UNH due to lack of funding to pay me to work all summer.

I started playing hockey in the Connecticut Hockey League in September as well. The league is nowhere near as well-run as the GSHL, but it's hockey. My team is one of those that has different players every session, so you never know how good we'll be. We missed the playoffs during the winter session, but we are the second place seed into the playoffs for this spring-summer session (and have a real chance of winning it all since we beat the first place seed a few weeks ago). I also played in a tournament here just a week ago, notching my second career hat trick in the semi-final before losing in the final.

We did visit the Seattle area during Christmas, but between the extraordinary amount of snow there and the fact that it was Christmas, we were unable to see many people outside of immediate family.

My parents visited us in New Haven for my 40th birthday and gave me as a birthday present the highlight of the past year for me: a trip to Boston to see my first NHL game. The Bruins came from behind in a not-very-well-played game to defeat the Canadiens. It would have been nice if it had been a well-played and exciting game, but when it comes right down to it, it was the NHL. I was so excited to be there, I admit that I nearly started crying when the teams came out to start the game. Kovalev scored the first goal of the game, and I'd wanted to see him score, so that was nice. :-)

A couple of days later, my dad and I went to Bridgeport to see the Sound-Tigers (a NY Islanders farm team) take on the Lowel Devils (a NJ Devils farm team) in the AHL. The skill level may not have been quite as high as the NHL game, but it we sat right on the ice (No, not literally--in the first row on the crowd side of the boards. Sheesh!) and the game was considerably more fun. That was one of the best times I have ever spent with my father. We really connected and had a great time.

Things I Have Learned (other than school stuff)

Connecticut drivers are crazy. Okay, I already knew that from the visit last June, but it's definitely been confirmed. It might help if a few more people would hang up their cell phones and concentrate on driving. A far higher percentage of drivers here are on their cell phones even though here it is a primary offense. Maybe if the police actually enforced the law, it might make a difference.

I'm not much of a blogger. I think of great things to blog about, but I never seem to get around to writing the posts. You guys have missed some pretty deep insights because I never got around to writing them down. Just be impressed anyway. ;-)

Connecticut isn't a bad place to live--except in the summer. I don't mind the cold in the winter. I could even handle a couple of weeks of really hot, dry weather (such as western Washington and Oregon have been sweltering through recently), but hot and humid is the pits. Granted, I haven't experienced 100° and 100% humidity (never been to Georgia, in other words), but the current 81° and 87% humidity is pretty damn nasty. We have a small AC unit in our bedroom (that's all we can afford). It gets the bedroom down to about 75° and 55-60% humidity at night, which feels frighteningly cool and dry after the days here.

I need an umbrella. There's something I never thought I would say. Western Washington gets a lot of rain, but spaces it out over a lot of days. Except for one day in Tuscon, AZ, I have never seen it rain as hard as it does here. If we are expecting an inch of rain in one day, it will probably fall in about 2 hours here. In Seattle, it would take the whole day--which is still pretty soggy, but the streets don't become 6" deep rivers. The other issue is that when it rains in Seattle, you can wear a rain coat and be comfortable. When it's 80° and there's a waterfall pouring on your head, putting on a rain coat just makes you hot and sticky--it's much better to have an umbrella in that situation. (I still snicker at those who pull out an umbrella for a light mist or even a light rain, but I understand the need for it in a heavy rain when it's too warm for a coat.)

East coast people are not all rude. It is a common belief that people are ruder on the east coast than on the west coast. That may well be true in some places, but not really in greater New Haven. The people here are a lot like they are in the Puget Sound region. You may not get quite as many friendly nods from strangers while walking down the road, but people are not on the whole any ruder than I have experienced in the past. We've met some great people over here and at least one of them is even a Connecticut native. :-)

Okay, I'm sure I skipped details in the summary and that I learned more than I listed here, but this is getting long so I'm going to wrap it up. In short, we both miss the Seattle-Tacoma area, I miss my old hockey teams, and I (for one) would love to be able to move back to Seattle some day (though I don't think it will happen any time soon). On the other hand, New Haven is not a bad place to live. The weather isn't too bad outside of the mid-July to mid-August range (which is the same as for the Seattle area, for that matter), the people are good, and you can learn to survive despite the local drivers. We miss Azteca, strip-mall teriyaki joints, and convenient Red Robin's (the nearest is in Hartford), but we're coping.

Oh, and the cats are fine, too, though they don't understand why Rachel and I have made it so hot and muggy recently and they wish we would fix it.