Sixteen Things to Love about (Our) Life in Delaware:
- The Punkin Chunkin (For a mental picture please, please look at this and this.)
- Grotto's Pizza (and the 50% military discount--now that's a business that "supports the troops"!)
- Free rides to Europe on C-5's
- Walks around the capitol
- The Rehoboth Beach Outlets
- No sales tax
- The combination of #5 and #6 (Sorry, Mike Huckabee, the government can take half my paycheck, but hands off my trip to the Outlets!)
- Living near the coast (I'm feeling a little claustrophobic here in the midwest.)
- Proximity to Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and New York City
- Caesar Rodney (I can't quite bring myself to type the words "High School" too, so we'll just leave it at "Caesar Rodney," who was, I gather, a pretty cool guy. He's on the Delaware quarter, which was, incidentally, designed by the art teacher at Caesar Rodney High School.)
- The Amish and Mennonites in our community
- Flatwater kayaking
- Our apartment on Silver Lake (except for the semiannual NASCAR races across the street--wow! was that educational)
- Free classes at the University of Delaware for all public school teachers
- Jill Biden (Okay, so she had nothing to do with our time in Delaware, but I can put her on this list if I feel like it. She has apparently discovered that teaching English at a community college, specifically Del-Tech, is where it's at, something I myself discovered . . . right before I had a baby and moved to Turkey. Oh well.)
- Being from Delaware
A note on getting my Ohio driver's license: Yes, I've lived here over a year. The regulation states that upon relocating to Ohio, you should obtain your Ohio driver's license "as soon as possible," with the "suggestion" that you do it within 30 days. Sorry, folks, but my interpretation of "as soon as possible" is the week my Delaware license expires.
A note to those of you who form irrational emotional attachments to your driver's licenses, like I do: When I moved to California and had to turn in my Arizona license, I broke down in tears. Not my beloved lifetime driver's license that expired in the year 2037 (yes, Arizona is a really weird state)! So when I moved to Delaware and faced the prospect of turning in my California license, to which, by then, I had formed an intense emotional bond, I "lost" my California license, sent away for a new one, then conveniently "found" the old one. So I traded in my new California license in Delaware, and the original one still sits in a box somewhere, where I will never look at it again, but I am deeply comforted with the knowledge that I still have it. Unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight to "lose" my Delaware license . . . so it's gone forever, and I have a tacky Ohio one sitting in its place. I have no doubt that I will shed a tear about handing in my Ohio license at some future date. But for now it is a cold, foreign object crammed between my Cafe Rio card and my Washington College student ID. I have a hard time letting go.
