Vermonters can now "Come Hungry and Leave Happy" tm

It's official: Vermont has an IHOP. Big whoop, you say? Perhaps you were unaware the Vermont was the last state in the union to host the 'House. From WCAX's morning newscast:

"A recession may not be the best time to open a new restaurant...

But the owners are betting that i-Hop at the University Mall will be a winner. The owners spent the weekend training new servers and staff for the grand opening on Tuesday. These customers were specially invited to check it out. At a time when jobs are hard to come by, the new i-Hop has hired over a hundred employees.

Proprietor Sam Handy told Channel 3, "We can bring people in, bring a new business to the area, you know, hire 110 people which gets a lot of people off their feet from some tough times, you know, from being laid off. We can get them going again. It's a little nerve wracking with the economy, but I think it's going to work out really well."

Vermont is the last of the fifty states to get an i-Hop. Although it's a national franchise, the restaurant at University Mall is owned locally -- by the Handy family."

I remember distinctly the shock that set in when I first moved to Vermont from Massachusetts in 2000. I couldn't purchase my normal brands of toothpaste, bread, orange juice or moisturizer, and I lived in the only metropolitan area in the state. I found out that according to the 1990 census there were more cows than people in the state. I now lived closer to Montreal than Boston. The state was in the middle of the nasty "Take Back Vermont" campaign where all the yahoos came out of the woodwork to protest Civil Unions and angry jackasses from the "kingdom" (that's the Northeast Kingdom to those of you unfamiliar with the term for the highly poverty stricken and rural northeast corner of VT) were on the news constantly spewing some of the most vitriolic and hateful language I've ever heard on TV. I had to pull over and throw up when I drove down a road with dead deer strung up in people's front yards to bleed dry before butchering. I learned that half of the state hadn't been on an electrical grid until the late 60's when the first highway went up, and that many of the major roads used to cross from east to west close for the winter since they go through the green mountains. There's even an extra season, "mud season" that happens when the rest of the country has Spring. In short, I looked around at my new surroundings and thought I had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

But it's grown on me over the last 9 years. I still miss Massachusetts and always will, but this is now home. We have no Target, no Ikea, no Ann Taylor, no Nordstroms, no DSW, to only mention a few chain stores I miss, but we do have the distinction of being the only state to not have a MacDonalds in our capitol (nor do we have one in Burlington, thank goodness). All in all, it's a mixed bag. No one accidentally lives in Vermont. You may grow up here, come for college, or move here at some point without much thought, but you only stay because you want to. It is not an easy place to live.

But of course now that we have an IHOP, that may change.

In Celebration of Common Sense

I'd like to thank the VT state senate for doing the right thing and voting to approve same sex marriages! From the Burlington Free Press:

"The Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously this morning to recommend a same-sex marriage bill to the full Senate."

Congratulations to the great people in office who decided to celebrate the first day of Spring by voting to extend the right to marry and to all the same sex couples out there who are one step closer to ditching "separate but equal"!!!

Creating the tropics inside to give the finger to the outside

It's March in Vermont, which automatically means it's a combination of muddy, snowy, rainy, icy and a few other dwarves. Doesn't that sound delicious? For those of us that were raised in Massachusetts, we expect the crocus and daffodils to be emerging right now. But in Vermont, we have mud season. And what a mud season we are having! I wear galoshes to work every day and slip on the ice on the way to and from. But inside my apartment, I'm doing my damnedest to counteract the crappy, crappy weather. I give you... THE VIVARIUM:

I have a 40 gallon tank I bought in my junior year of college (ahem, we won't mention what year that was...) that I tried to sell three times on craigslist. All 10 buyers fell through, which made me think that somehow I was made to keep this tank. In an act of self-fulfilling prophecy, I turned it into a vivarium.



My first official act as creator was to add plant friendly gravel and a big ol' log that had been living in my turtle tank:



It looked a bit dull, so I decided it needed a few artificial rock formations. At midnight on a Friday, with a can of "Great Stuff" expanding foam and a few transparent plant holders, I had the beginnings of rocky crags:



At 6am after they'd cured overnight, I painted them grey:



At 10am, I realized everything else in the tank was brown and repainted:




Then I added water, a spike leafed Ivy, a pitcher plant, two African violets, a few pothos cuttings, and a peacock fern, and we had a vivarium!



Not pictured are Fred and Ginger, my two fancy guppies. Originally I had three neons as well, but they succumbed to the cold. Let us remember and mourn their little fishy souls.

For those of you who are desperate for tropical plants, I highly recommend sticking a whole bunch of plants in a big tank with a bit of water. Nothing makes you feel more tropical than a vivarium, unless you're willing to fork over the dough for a tropical vacation. Which I'm not. Unless you'd like to contribute to the l.e.h.a.l.e. commemorative vacation fund. In which case feel free to make all checks out to "cash".