Life in Utah
Posted in Life on Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Tomorrow will mark two weeks of living in Utah so far. I have to say this place has so far greatly exceeded my expectations. Though the weather hasn’t been incredibly conducive of skiing with little snow in the past month and temperatures well into the sixties the past few days, I have managed to eek out four days on the slopes between “Snowbird”:http://www.snowbird.com, “Alta”:http://www.alta.com, and “The Canyons”:http://www.thecanyons.com. With four ski resorts within a 30 minute drive, I find myself getting spoiled and picky about the days I choose to ski even though I have a season pass to Alta and Snowbird now. Some storms are predicted for this weekend, so hopefully the conditions will improve soon.
So far the gamble of moving to a new place with only the things I could carry in my car, 1,500 miles away from home, has paid off. For those of you who didn’t know, I monitored the rooms for rent postings on “Craigslist”:http://www.craigslist.org for a while before calling up a poster who is now my roommate. The house I’m living in sits atop a mountain at 6,500 ft, about 2,000 ft off the valley floor with a stunning view of “Mt. Timpanogos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbachus/377794978/, “Utah Valley”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbachus/377794978/, and “Utah Lake”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbachus/377795025/. Since it is on top of a mountain, it is somewhat isolated, but it’s just about a ten minute drive to the valley where everything is extremely convenient.
The layout of the cities and the transportation systems serving them have made getting to know the area much easier. All streets in the county are set up on a grid system so finding where an address refers to is extremely simple. For example, 35 E 11400 S would be just east of State St. (the divider between E and W) on 11400 S (or 114th South). Interchanges between the interstate and major arterials are controlled by “Single Point Urban Interchanges (SPUIs)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Point_Urban_Interchange which are incredibly effective in pushing traffic through intersections. The traffic alleviation methods used apparently work, since at rush hour the worst traffic I’ve been in has been a decrease in speed to 40mph for two miles on the interstate.
The biggest challenge so far has been meeting people. I came here not knowing a single person in the area and haven’t improved much on that over the past two weeks. Now that I’m more or less settled in, I’m going to have to make a conscious effort to meet people. I’m planning on going to a networking event for fellow geeks tomorrow night, and I’m reaching out to old acquaintances and people with similar interests, so we’ll see how it goes.
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