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Loving Where You Live

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    Loving Where You Live

    Yup, it's the positive counterpoint to Danie's 'What Do You Hate About Where You Live' thread, hee hee.

    I love Las Vegas lingo. Just a few:
    Whale - a high roller, someone who gambles big money
    Toke - a tip or gratuity
    Comp - something given for free. It can be a noun: "Did you get any comps while you were here?" A verb: "Hey, let me comp you breakfast" or an adjective: "He got a comp room tonight"
    Shill - this is an oldie. It's someone, usually a good-looking woman, who works for the house (casino) to encourage other gamblers to play and spend more money. She's not actually a prostitute (although I'm sure some do go above & beyond their day job's description), but she might act as a hostess - nothing makes a whale want to show off more than having a beautiful woman on his arm.
    Eye in the Sky - the Surveillance Department.
    Flickers/Flippers - the guys on the street that hand out business cards to porn sites & escort services.
    Weekend Warriors - out-of-town women who come in on the weekends to earn extra money in various ways
    Vegas throat - it's common this time of year, when it gets hot, and you're in & out of the dry desert heat & humid indoor a/c. It's kind of like strep throat without the actual strep bacteria - you get that red, raw scratchy throat, some people lose their voice or get a bronchial cough. Part of the charm in working graveyard is not getting Vegas throat because the temperature mellows out & humidity rises a little after dark, so the climate indoors & outdoors are more even.

    Speaking of which - I love being able to work a graveyard shift. You'd think that in IT or the tourism industry, there'd be a need for graveyard people wherever you go, but the difference is that smaller towns might only need one single solitary graveyard person, and a relief person for the regular's day off, per late night businesses. And some places close completely over night. In Las Vegas, we need thousands of nightcrawlers.

    I love the heat. Honestly. I'm like a lizard - when I wake up in the evenings, I like to go out on my porch & lay down on the sunbaked concrete & just soak up the warmth. Not so much the direct sunlight (I'm pale & the sun & I have agreed to disagree) as its unrelenting power. I used to go on long walks in the afternoon out in the outskirts of town and I'd come home feeling absolutely clean and purified, especially if it was windy. Now, of course, the outskirts of town are a lot farther away than I want to walk, lol. I've been here long enough that I've learned our seasonal patterns and shifts, and my life sort of synchs up with it. In Autumn, the sunlight changes, becomes softer and more golden, the air feels heavier, and you can feel the desert anticipating the busy winter ahead. Busy winter? Only in a desert Most of our native plants go dormant in summer, except for a brief period of blooming and growing during the monsoon. They do all their sexy-time-fun in winter, when it's cooler and moister. It frustrates the mother-in-law to no end, because she wants trees that follow her version of the four seasons - they should be green in summer, not dropping their leaves all over her yard, dammit!

    I like how we're in this little bowl, surrounded by small rugged mountains on all sides, with unique weather patterns. I love that we have an actual monsoon season, and we get tremendous thunder storms and heat lightning. Our thunder here sounds like the sky is cracking open.

    I love that there is still wildlife - desert foxes with huge ears, coyotes, a couple different species of bats, feral horses, mule deer, big horn sheep, mountain lions, burros, pronghorn, elk, rattlesnakes, centipedes, tarantulas, geckos, skinks, coral snakes & king snakes, hawks, ravens (huuuuge ravens - I never imagined ravens to be so big, seriously, they are like 4' tall & very ominous, dangerous looking birds), grackles, mourning doves... I'd love the scorpions if they didn't infest our back yard - and even the native giant hairy desert scorpion would be welcome but the bark scorpions are an invasive species. I love that we are in the basin of an ancient shallow inland sea - all this desert, with ichthyosaur skeletons and fossilized sea shells and kelp and sea-stuff dotting the landscape.
    The forum member formerly known as perzephone. Or Perze. I've shed a skin.

    #2
    Re: Loving Where You Live

    I love the air. Since we're so windy out here we tend to have pretty clean air (I only learned this when I had breathing problems in Virginia). There is also a beauty in Eastern Kansas that is really nice. It's not as flat as people think (check out the photos of the Flint Hills and Eastern Kansas), though Western Kansas is flat.

    Sometimes the unstable weather makes for a good laugh. It's hilarious to me how it will rain on one side of the street and not the other. Funny enough out here weather conversations aren't a last resort topic. The weather is that unstable. We also will humor you about certain stereotypes. Hiding from a tornado? Yeah, unless it's coming our way we tend to sit outside and watch it like morons. That's probably why it's not uncommon to find / know a few storm chasers (though they used to be called tornado chasers).

    In Eastern Kansas I've found folks are pretty welcoming and hospitable unless you or the group is a jerk. I've had long, enlightening conversations with total strangers in the grocery store. It was a total culture shock for me to not have similar circumstances in Virginia (if you can't tell I didn't fare well there). It's also reflected in a lot of the way we do business. There's less of an issue with letting folks come in to use the restroom than I've found in other places. We understand out here, and even in cities like Kansas City you are hard pressed to find someone who won't let you just use the restroom.

    I also love--albeit fading out these days--the way education is prioritized. It may be an Eastern Kansas thing because of how folks in Central and Western Kansas prioritize things, but it was important that children were taught to be functioning adults. The education cuts actually angered a large portion of the population since most folks were adamantly against it.

    In Kansas folks are also fairly polite unless angered...like, polite to a fault at times. You may be spoken to aside if you're starting to annoy folks or cause a scene, but it's rare to see us truly angry. You'll know when we're angry, trust me. Just ask AzazelEblis.
    my etsy store
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    "...leave me curled up in my ball,
    surrounded by plush, downy things,
    ill prepared, but willing,
    to descend."

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      #3
      Re: Loving Where You Live

      Originally posted by Caelia View Post
      Sometimes the unstable weather makes for a good laugh. It's hilarious to me how it will rain on one side of the street and not the other.
      We get that here, too. It'll be a thunderstorm, pouring rain out the front of the house & a clear, sunny day in the backyard.
      The forum member formerly known as perzephone. Or Perze. I've shed a skin.

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        #4
        Re: Loving Where You Live

        It's also fun to watch the sheets of rain come in too
        my etsy store
        My blog


        "...leave me curled up in my ball,
        surrounded by plush, downy things,
        ill prepared, but willing,
        to descend."

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Loving Where You Live

          I do love it here:

          -There's soooo much going on. I just got home from a burlesque show (I was modelling in a fashion show that was part of it). It is Wednesday. Great stuff happens in Berlin 7 days a week.
          -This wasn't true when I moved here, but there are now a lot of great restaurants in Berlin. People who are awesome chefs move here from all over the world and bring their awesome recipes with them.
          -ARTS. This is a global arts capital (and I mean arts broadly...visual, music, theatre, film, etc). You notice it living here. There is creative stuff everywhere. Even when the art is questionable, there's usually some sort of event attached to it.
          -Central in Europe. Trains going everywhere, EasyJet flights going everywhere. It's easy to travel when you live here.
          -GREEN...tree-lined streets, lots of parks, surrounded by lakes.
          -It's an extremely bikeable city. You don't need a car here anyway because of the public transport system, but you can even choose to skip that, because there are bike lanes everywhere and drivers are used to sharing the road.
          -Food necessities like produce, meat, cheese and milk are really cheap. Thanks subsidies!
          -The weather might suck most of the time, but when it's good, it's REALLY good, and everyone in the city is in an awesome mood.
          -You can be a total freak and no one cares. You might get strange looks sometimes for wearing something different (oddly it's more often when it's something nice), but ultimately you can do, say, and wear whatever you want, to the point of being a total freak show and you wont have problems.
          -The crime rate is LOW.
          -It's pretty affordable to live here. It actually even skews your idea of "expensive"

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            #6
            Re: Loving Where You Live

            Mermaids. Everywhere.
            Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of HistoryPagan Devotionals, because the wind and the rain is our Bible
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              #7
              Re: Loving Where You Live

              I absolutely love the scenery here. It's practically green year 'round here. Mostly because we have Evergreen trees EVERYWHERE...and that's what this region is pretty much known for. But, the grass is always green, too. The winters are nice and mild. And by mild, I pretty much mean not so snowy. We get a little each year, but it's hardly note-worthy most of the time because at the most, it'll be two inches, and thawed come lunch time. THANK GODS! I hate snow. Thanks Michigan for making me hate it! And having a long driveway. :/

              Days like today are a constant reminder of why I love it. It was slightly overcast, but still sunny enough to be extremely pleasant. Not to mention, I got to see, not one, not two, not three, but FOUR of our lovely Volcanoes. Mt. Hood is the most common one to see since it's so close. Mt. St. Helens is the second most common one since she's also very close. Then, on clear days we can see Mt. Adams and sometimes Mt. Rainier as well. LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE.

              The air is also one of my favorite things here. It's so clean and fresh and crisp. Living right at the end of the Columbia Gorge makes for very windy times but it's usually always enjoyable. Unless it's rainy at the same time.

              Speaking of which, the Rain. I love the Rain. Can't get enough of it. I would not mind one bit if it rained 365 days every year. Despite it being "rain" it's soft and warm. If that makes sense.
              �Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.�
              ― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
              Sneak Attack
              Avatar picture by the wonderful and talented TJSGrimm.

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                #8
                Re: Loving Where You Live

                People don't often think of West Virginia and diversity but we have a lot of cultures here due to steel and coal. Polish, Lebanese, Italian, Celtic, German and they all have festivals every year. Good food and information can be had. I love the rural aspect of the state and being only 500 miles of several major US cities. Pittsburgh is only 45 miles away so we have access to culture if we want it. I love the river, hills, wildlife, people. I have loved it enough to stay even with the economy never really being great. I also love that we don't get hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes (at least not bad ones). Flooding and snow are our biggest issues and they can be planned for or lived out of the way of. We also have Fall. I love Autumn.

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