My Vermont Life

My life in Vermont is certainly not an exciting one. I love my apartment which is right in town: comfortable, spacious, and convenient to the post office and library. I’ve been to the library only once, preferring to read the books that I have first. Right now, I am reading Greg Herren’s The Orion Mask. If you are a long time reader of this blog, then you know that Greg Herren is one of my favorite authors.

My weekdays tend to consist of getting up, taking a shower and heading to my office. Usually, the first thing I do when I get to work is fix cup of coffee. When students are on campus and the campus eateries are open, I often eat at one of them for lunch. The staff tends to eat together which is nice; I never have liked eating alone.I guess that comes from my mama always cooking supper when I was growing up and we all sat down for meals together. How my mama worked a full time job and came home and cooked a full meal every night is beyond me. Most days when I get home from work, I cook a simple dinner for myself and usually watch Jeopardy. I rarely eat out, and almost never on weeknights. The only time I eat out is occasionally on the weekend, especially if I drive up to Burlington. One of my favorite local dishes, which is actually a Canadian dish, is called poutine. Poutine is French fries topped with cheese curds and smothered in gravy.  Everyone makes it differently, but with that set of ingredients, it’s hard to go wrong.

On Saturday, I do what shopping I need to get done, unless that shopping calls for Burlington, then I make trips to Burlington on Sundays. I don’t go to church every Sunday, but I do occasionally go. Just like eating out by myself, I am not a fan of going to church alone. Every other weekend or so, I take little road trips. One Saturday I drove down to see Dartmouth College. Another weekend I drove up to St. Albans. I am trying to explore more, but I’ll be honest, the roads in Vermont are a tad bit scary to me. Everywhere you go, you drive through mountains; sometimes there are even parts of the mountains sticking up in the median of the highway. I try to drive very carefully because accidents are common on these roads, but I do enjoy taking little road trips.

Work is going great. I have mentioned before that my predecessors had two very different ways of doing things. Some of their ways I have merged into mine, but mostly I established my own filing system and my own system of record keeping. If something were to happen to me, someone could easily step in and take my place. There should not be any problem knowing exactly where I am on different tasks because I keep up with everything on a workflow spreadsheet. It allows me to look up any interview and know exactly what needs to be done next. After my interview today, I will go in and update that system to reflect where I am currently.

So that is kind of an update on what life in Vermont is like. I miss my family, and I especially miss my cats, but after seven months, I’ve pretty well settled in. By the way, today marks my seventh month on the job. I’d say things are going well.