Things I've Noticed

So I've noticed a few things about this little city.

First, most parking here is diagonal. All street parking, and most of the big parking lots too. No idea why, although it might be because everyone trying to parallel park their giant American-made behemoths or crank them around into perfectly straight lines perpendicular to the store would be ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against American cars. I just don't get the point of buying giant behemoths if you're not lugging around a ton of stuff all the time. And most people around here seem to have giant behemoths. When I say behemoth, I mean those giant pickup trucks that they show on commercials dragging giant steel pipes around and bragging about how manly they are with their hemi, whatever that is, and some obnoxious amount of torque, or the big SUVs that they show driving through ridiculous mud puddles and up around mountains or whatever. If you do construction work, if you need to haul big trailers around, that's fine, but do you really need all that power just to get groceries? Anyway...I don't really have an issue with the diagonal parking, except that it makes getting *out* of street parking fairly dangerous (backing into oncoming traffic = not safe). I'm just not used to it, so at the moment I'm not that good at it. I'm used to judging my alignment with other cars with straight lines, but I can't do that when there's a behemoth truck on one side and a tiny old boxy car on the other and EVERYONE'S CROOKED...or so it seems to me. :P Diags are hard enough to align with just people and instruments...I don't need mismatched steel frames too... >.< Okay rant done.

Second, Carlsbad is an odd place in the case of what services and what restaurants are available. There seem to be way too many gas stations. The number of gas stations only starts to make sense when you realize that Carlsbad is a stop on a highway that, between cities, has absolutely nothing off of it except for country roads and potash mines - but it still seems excessive. There's tons of fast food places, but not many good sit-down places. There's two Sonics when I never saw a single one in all of Michigan. And the Denny's is open 24 hours. I guess if I ever have a craving at some ridiculous hour for a heart-stopping meal consisting of five eggs, two pounds of meat glistening with grease, and way too many carbs, I know where to go. There's also a lot of loan and tax places, and rental places for appliances and furniture. There's THREE dollar stores of various names that I've counted. But in this whole town, there's only one locksmith and one place that'll fix windows. Apparently this is the reason that my front windows are cracked and have been that way for several months.

Another odd thing - there's a Do It Best Hardware store next to a church. That in itself isn't odd, really - but the sign with the movable letters underneath the Do It Best sign appears to belong to the church. So, when you glance up at said sign, expecting to see something like "Summer Sale - Hoses Half-Off!" or "Buy Hammer, Get 50 Nails Free!", you instead see "Come Worship With Us", which just seems weird underneath the Do It Best sign.

I've also noticed that the dry air seems to suck the moisture out of me. I'm constantly thirsty, my lips are already chapped again even though I've been indoors most of the day, and if I don't use my Aveeno lotion fairly often, my skin gets itchy from the dryness. But don't worry about me - I have two giant bottles of fruit juice, all the tap water I could want, at least 5 tubes of chapstick/blistex/lip balm substances scattered throughout my boxes of belongings, and a large pump bottle of Aveeno that "relieves itchy, extra dry skin" and "moisturizes for 24 hours". And if I run out of anything at any time, there's a Walmart open 24/7 just 5-10 minutes away. :)