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Old Man Kinda-Winter, Go Away Already

I must admit, moving from Iowa to San Diego was a bit of a culture shock, even though Iowa was simply a 7 year stepping-stone to my impending arrival here. Quick explanation, I lived in Maryland previously to being an Iowan. So even though I had a sense of culture and "city life" from being smack dab in the middle of Baltimore and D.C., it was as if living in Iowa erased all that. Nothing but corn and pigs in Iowa, as well as real winters.

My two year anniversary that celebrates my San Diego residency is less than two months away so the past few months have been only the second "winter" I have spent here. While my body acclimated very quickly to SoCal weather, my mind still reels from the ever-growing sense of the fortune I have found from not having seen one single snowflake in almost two years. Even in February I find myself basking in sunshine and warmth compared to what Iowa and even Maryland have been subjected to lately.

I have even seen the effects on a more smaller scale here in South Park. To backtrack slightly, when I moved to San Diego I lived in a part of town called Talmadge, directly where Fairmount and El Cajon meet. After that I spent six months or so up in Poway. It wasn't until the middle of April of last year that I became a resident of this fantastic area called South Park. Yet even in less than a year I have seen the effects of typical San Diego winter weather in my neighborhood. If you don't know, I live less than a block from an oft rambunctious watering hole, Hamilton's, and directly above a rather posh restaurant called Alchemy. Last summer I lasted through the nightly bar crowd and their extremely loud, if not entertaining, antics. Yet once September and October rolled around, those evenings of eavesdropping on drunken bar-heads have dropped off significantly. Now it has been relegated to weekends and even then, I have to listen hard to hear them.

I've tried to figure out if it's the weather, even though I find it strange that a drop of barely 10 or 15 degrees would keep the thin-skinned home or in bed earlier than their summer escapades, or if it could be for any other reason, such as a lack of funds to spend on alcohol and stupidity. Either way, I've found myself rather disappointed and missing the "good ol' days" of inane drunken shenanigans, even though I recently caught a couple outside my apartment shaking their car with some old fashioned, young-at-heart relations. If the tinted-windowed PT Cruiser is a-rockin'.... At first I was kinda disgusted by it but when they were done and realized they left their lights on and had to jump the battery, it made it all worth it.

So please, Old Man Kinda-Winter, go away already. Your presence bores me and makes my South Park weeknights and most weekend evenings boring. I enjoy the fact that the leaves still remain on the trees but damn, you really do bring out the stodgy, staleness in people.

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I must admit, moving from Iowa to San Diego was a bit of a culture shock, even though Iowa was simply a 7 year stepping-stone to my impending arrival here. Quick explanation, I lived in Maryland previously to being an Iowan. So even though I had a sense of culture and "city life" from being smack dab in the middle of Baltimore and D.C., it was as if living in Iowa erased all that. Nothing but corn and pigs in Iowa, as well as real winters.

My two year anniversary that celebrates my San Diego residency is less than two months away so the past few months have been only the second "winter" I have spent here. While my body acclimated very quickly to SoCal weather, my mind still reels from the ever-growing sense of the fortune I have found from not having seen one single snowflake in almost two years. Even in February I find myself basking in sunshine and warmth compared to what Iowa and even Maryland have been subjected to lately.

I have even seen the effects on a more smaller scale here in South Park. To backtrack slightly, when I moved to San Diego I lived in a part of town called Talmadge, directly where Fairmount and El Cajon meet. After that I spent six months or so up in Poway. It wasn't until the middle of April of last year that I became a resident of this fantastic area called South Park. Yet even in less than a year I have seen the effects of typical San Diego winter weather in my neighborhood. If you don't know, I live less than a block from an oft rambunctious watering hole, Hamilton's, and directly above a rather posh restaurant called Alchemy. Last summer I lasted through the nightly bar crowd and their extremely loud, if not entertaining, antics. Yet once September and October rolled around, those evenings of eavesdropping on drunken bar-heads have dropped off significantly. Now it has been relegated to weekends and even then, I have to listen hard to hear them.

I've tried to figure out if it's the weather, even though I find it strange that a drop of barely 10 or 15 degrees would keep the thin-skinned home or in bed earlier than their summer escapades, or if it could be for any other reason, such as a lack of funds to spend on alcohol and stupidity. Either way, I've found myself rather disappointed and missing the "good ol' days" of inane drunken shenanigans, even though I recently caught a couple outside my apartment shaking their car with some old fashioned, young-at-heart relations. If the tinted-windowed PT Cruiser is a-rockin'.... At first I was kinda disgusted by it but when they were done and realized they left their lights on and had to jump the battery, it made it all worth it.

So please, Old Man Kinda-Winter, go away already. Your presence bores me and makes my South Park weeknights and most weekend evenings boring. I enjoy the fact that the leaves still remain on the trees but damn, you really do bring out the stodgy, staleness in people.

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