This was supposed to be posted on Oct 20

Today is my birthday, happy bday to me! Not doing much, just staying home, I have to work tomorrow. =P

The thing that astounds me about living in Federal Way is that it's a small city compared with Seattle. Yet every single business/restaurant chain you could possibly think of is here! Well, except Hooters, but that's not far off. There is not 1 but 2 Walmarts and they are only about 1 mile from each other, ridiculous! I guess all those people living in apartments make for lots of business.

I get only 7 or 8 TV stations here from my rabbit ear antenna. Those HD stations don't broadcast nearly as well as the old broadcast spectrum. One of the stations I get is the weather channel. I don't remember seeing a weather channel in the SF Bay Area. I think it's because the weather isn't that big a deal in SF. The weather is basically the same all year round, cold, windy, foggy, sometimes warm, etc. Here we get the whole gamut from rain, to snow, all the way to 90 degree heat.

People seem to pay a little more attention here. If it's raining lots of people will postpone doing things. In SF you don't worry about it because it doesn't rain. It's been cloudy and raining the past 4 days. The threat of flooding is very real here. The Green River Valley, which is not far from me, flooded last year. When it gets too wet the army corp of engineers releases water from the dam. When that happens you can get floods.

There's lots more water here than in SF. There are little lakes everywhere. Some of them are recreation areas, many are private lakes off limit to those who don't live around the lake.

People here are much more conscientious of hitting other people's parked cars which can be extremely annoying. I was getting out of my car today and I had to open my car door close to the car next to me. I didn't hit her car, but the owner of the car was walking by and she literally stopped and looked right down at me as if I had dented her car door. As I walked by her she walked straight down and scrutinized her door as if I had hit it. Stupid woman. When you hit someone else's door you can tell, it's really obvious. Even if I did hit her car, if it's that subtle it never results in any damage anyways, car doors aren't that fragile. Most have little side bumpers anyways, it's not like those doors are made of eggshells. Very annoying. Oh well, I guess it's a good thing that people are so conscious of it. People in SF didn't car about my car and they trashed the sides pretty good, many of them were VERY blatant without any care or respect for me or my car at all.

My cousin told me of a story how he hit the lady's car in front of him while he was parallel parking. She tried to sue him for hit and run after he touched her license plate while he was parking. I'll have to keep that in mind next time I parallel park. People here have a different mentality than in SF. You have to baby them a bit more here which is actually a good thing because I'd rather be conscientious. That's always a good thing.