Oh, that's right. I have a blog.

I've made the drive between my parents' house in Pittsburgh and my apartment in Baltimore five times in the less than one month I've had NuJeep. That's 224 miles each way, according to Google Maps. That's over 1100 miles, for those of you counting at home. My, my, how the miles pile up. I've come to despise Frederick in that short amount of time, and to find Maryland drivers absolutely befuddling. Now, I know that Pennsylvania drivers are usually put down by Megalopolis drivers (Hm. I live in Megalopolis now. How odd.), but seriously? Maryland drivers are incredibly timid on highways. It should not take five miles of highway to pass a truck. But it does when a Marylander is driving. On the other hand, Baltimore drivers are a tad aggressive. If by "a tad" you mean "crazy enough to brush the jersey wall while passing another driver in a single lane off ramp because it was just soo critical to beat the other driver to the red light at the bottom of the exit." Which I've seen not once but twice on a single lane on ramp. In my two and half weeks here. Which is a little crazy.

I really shouldn't talk about work in any kind of specifics. It looks like it's going to be challenging, but I'm still in that n00b waiting and reading pattern. On the plus side, I might get to rewrite parts of the official website that are immediately relevant to my little area while I await more in-depth projects. On the minus side, it's probably going to involve writing by committee, which makes me want to cry. I know that my teeny care of readers would never guess (based on my blathering here) that I'm a fair writer. I say fair-- I've taken writing classes, but I'm not a Writer. But lord, I daresay I'm a little better than some of the people who have authored official documents. I mean, seriously. The PfH drove me to tears with a million critiques of my style. She would be driven to tears if she read some of the things I've read. Random capitalization of nouns. Poor phrasing. Redundancy. Semicolon abuse. Imprecise language. It goes on. My inner editor is thrilled to take a red pen to some of these nightmares. But let's see how much of a leash my inner author is given.

Otherwise... I'm putting the finishing touches on my place. I suppose it's time to start getting to know my new city.. though I've already had some misadventures. Scary misadventures. I'm a little nervous about just driving around now. It's also... well, it's a little hard to meet people when you tend toward the introverted, independent type and you're living in a city where you pretty much don't know anyone. We'll see how this goes, I guess.