new england living :-)

(the pics doesn't match the texts, but i thought you might want to see my cute little town of northampton) so i've been talking so much about school that i've forgotten to write about how much i love living here. the area is beautiful. living in western mass, as i do, rural (a helluva lot of farms - which means fresh fresh produce!). um, just in case you didn't know, amherst/northampton is in a valley. i have several sizable mountains viewable when i'm scooting around. the coolest thing in the early AM (about the only good thing about driving so early to my [bleeping] 8am TA...) is seeing the clouds/fog floating just starting to lift. so beautiful. the trees are just starting to change colors. only a few leaves on each tree, showing signs of autumn. it's cool to see little splashes of yellows or oranges in an otherwise green tree. i can't wait for the colors to really come out. i have my camera ready to take pics. it's exciting.

so the rural thing. it's taken a little bit to get used to. it's not like delaware was this major metropolis, but it was keeping with the times and there were strip malls and shopping centers in abundance. i now have to drive about 20 minutes to find something like that (oddly, in a slightly poorer town :-\ weirdness). i guess it's nice. it's not like i have any $$ to spend on that sort of thing, but it's definitely weird to consolidate trips because the store isn't really right around the corner.

oh, just to throw in a complete non-sequitur (because i'm so good at that!), in my stats class, we ran a regression on earnings and age to examine the relationship between getting older and one's earnings (oooh! i sound smart...). anyway, the regression equation showed that at zero years, you should make $16k and you would experience an increase of $506 per year. granted, it's only a linear regression and in context, that makes little sense to earn $16k as an infant. i just thought it was funny that my one year-old nephew could potentially (according to my regression) make more money than me. gotta love stats...