everybody talks about the weather...

Before we moved to Maryland, Ben and I had lived in Northeast Ohio our entire lives. (Well, there was that brief time when Ben lived in Libya, but that is a story for another day.) Anyway. Because we had always lived in Ohio, we pretty much knew what to expect from the weather, season by season. Sure, there were aberrations over the years. There were some summers that were so hot for so long that we forgot what it felt like to be cool in those pre air-conditioned (for us) days. There was The Great Blizzard of 1978 when our new little Toyota was buried under three feet of snow and nobody went anywhere. There was the freezing rain that fell in April of 2007 as we were leaving for Chicago to attend Tom and Kristy's wedding that wiped out all the wisteria blossoms, along with pretty much all the other blossoms, as well.

By and large, though, we could pretty much predict how the weather would behave in any given season. We knew it would snow too much in the winter and rain too much in the spring. We knew that on summer days when dark clouds rolled across the sky and thunder rumbled in the distance, a soaking summer rain would soon follow. We knew that Indian Summer would come each fall with colors so beautiful and air so crisp that we could forget for a few days that winter was almost upon us.

Those days are gone. Living in a different part of the country is, well, different - as we knew it would be. Since we live right outside of Baltimore, we expected the weather to be hotter and more humid in the summer, and it is. But day after day with temperatures in the upper 90s and even over 100° on several days is really worse than we thought it would be. Nor did we expect day after day (and week after week) to go by without even a hope of rain.

Everyone tells us, however, that this is not normal. "It's not usually this hot for this long." "We're breaking records every day." "We're in the middle of a drought." "The whole country is like this." And, you know, I believe that. I believe it all. But that doesn't help me understand what to expect tomorrow or next week or next year. Each day is a surprise to me. I just hope there are some pleasant surprises in the mix as well.

a post written by one of the newest residents of the state of Maryland

New residents of Maryland are given sixty days to switch over their car registration, title, license plates, and driver's license. This seems like ample time to me, allowing for the myriad other things folks are doing when they move to a new house in a new state. I wish I would have had that much time to get all those things accomplished, but I didn't. As you may know, I celebrate my birthday pretty much right after the first of the year. So, instead of having sixty days, I had thirty. Frankly, that was barely enough time.

I didn't work on car stuff too much the first couple of weeks we were here, but I kicked it into gear around mid-month. The Maryland MVA (Motor Vehicle Administration) has one of the most confusing, difficult-to-navigate websites I have ever tried to use. I'm sorry, but that's just the truth. It reduced me to frustrated tears more than once. But with Ben and Julie helping me along, I began to understand the steps I had to take and in what order I had to take them.

I called two different service stations to schedule an appointment to get the MSI (Maryland State Inspection) done. Neither of them provided that service and they directed me to locations in other cities that I hadn't even heard of at that point. I ended up calling the Toyota dealership about a mile from our house and was able to schedule an appointment there. Everything went like clockwork until the service manager came and sat down by me in the waiting area to tell me that my car had not passed the inspection. I basically needed new brakes, front and back. Well, you can probably imagine the cost, but the dealership, and the service manager in particular, were stellar, and at the end of the next day my car was delivered to me along with the state inspection certificate I needed.

I had to gather documentation to proof that I was indeed who I claimed to be and that I lived where I said I did. Proving my identity was fairly easy - I needed my social security card and my birth certificate. Check. Proving that I do indeed live here in Maryland was a little more difficult. Most of the bills come to this address in Ben's name. I filled out an application for a voter registration card at the library, but learned that takes six weeks to arrive. I didn't have six weeks. Hm-m-m. I had a bill from the Baltimore Sun. Would that work? I had bank statements from two different banks. I could use a cancelled check, I learned, but who gets back cancelled checks anymore? One of my banks provides a printable copy of my cancelled checks, however, and when one finally came back, I printed that up. I felt pretty confident that my papers were in order.

The next step was to find the nearest MVA office. We live in Baltimore County, but the Baltimore County office is in Essex, so that seemed farther than we needed to go. We considered going to the Baltimore City office, but got horribly lost trying to find it. Ben knows his way around Glen Burnie a bit from the three months he lived there this fall, so we were off to Glen Burnie. The office there was easy to find and huge, actually, so I resolved to go there the following week. Unfortunately, the day we chose to go, the office was closed. I don't know why it didn't occur to us that that might be the case. Ben had the day off, so it wasn't unexpected that the employees there would, as well. But, even so, we didn't expect it.

The MVA website had warned that Mondays and Fridays are bad days to go, and that one shouldn't wait until the end of the month either. Well, I was pretty much out of options, so Julie and I drove to Glen Burnie yesterday. And, I have to tell you, it went off without a hitch. We were done in under two hours, and my little Toyota now sports Maryland Chesapeake Bay license plates with a heron on one side and a blue crab on the other. How cool is that? That's right, pretty damn cool.