Life in the South

Hello all my loyal readers. I apologize for the pause in my blog writing – these last couple weeks have been very hectic with work. However, I will now update you on a few of my findings and observations over these past couple weeks.

For those of you who don’t know I am now living in South Carolina. Right now I’m living in a Hampton Inn in exciting Clinton, but this coming Saturday I will be moving into an apartment in Simpsonville, SC (near Greenville). My job has me consulting with an OSB Mill. For those of you who don’t know – OSB stands for Oriented Strand Board. Basically they make walls and roofs out of it on houses. The next time you’re wandering around Home Cheapo walk down to the lumber section and look for the big panels that look like lots of little pieces of wood all pressed together. That’s OSB. I’ll be spending a lot of time working with the front line guys at the mill. It should be quite exciting.

South Carolina has some unusual laws as I quickly found out. Apparently if someone comes on your property you can just shoot them. That is perfectly legal. However, there is a catch – you have to shoot them in the front. If you shoot them from behind they might investigate. My coworkers made sure to tell me that if I shoot someone in the back, make sure I roll them over and also shoot them in the front so I won’t get in trouble. Super.

South Carolina also has some strict sentencing laws. If you are convicted of armed robbery you go to jail for 10 years – no if, ands or buts. No chance for parole. You’re there for 10 years. So, just in case anyone was thinking of committing armed robbery in SC, you might want to think twice.

Last weekend I signed on my apartment. The cost of living here is fantastic. Let me do a rough comparison with Boston.

Boston
One bedroom apartment: $1200/month
Included features:
Fireplace: No
Pool: Ummm, no. Yes
Beach volleyball court: Huh?
Fitness center: Yea, right. Yes
Initial payment $3600 (first & last month’s rent, security deposit)

Greenville
One bedroom apartment: $630/month
Included features:
Fireplace: Yes
Pool: Yes
Beach volleyball court: Yes
Fitness center: Yes
Initial payment: $190 (security deposit, application fee)
Boo-yaw!

This weekend’s task was to buy furniture for the apartment. I needed to buy a bed, couch and coffee/end tables. I usurped a kitchen table set from my parents. I really like the tempurpedic beds, so I started there. I ended up settling on a Queen-sized Serta Vera Wang designer set memory foam/tempurpedic knock-off (which I though was more comfortable and also $600 less). As I was looking around the mattress section of the store I noticed one of Serta’s products was a really cushy pillow-top mattress they described as “European Style”. Yea right. If it were really European style it would be as thin, flat and hard as a mattress could possibly be. There are no pillow tops in Europe – not even at the Hilton.

I also bought a nice “oyster colored” (aka, off-white) couch. I ended up getting the sleeper version of it as well. I almost didn’t because those things are a bee-yatch to move, but then I realized – I’m an adult now – the company will relocate me and move all the stuff! I got a normal looking coffee table and matching end table as well. They had some really cool coffee table where the top is on a hinge and you can pull it up and out to turn it into a table while you eat in front of the TV. Since I almost always eat on the couch in front of the TV so I really liked this, but the only one that looked good aesthetically was too expensive. Oh well.

My bed will get delivered on Saturday and the Couch/coffee table/end tables will come a week from Saturday. At least I’ll have the bed on the day I move in.

During this trip I looked through 4 furniture stores and realized that 99% of furniture is fugly. Who would ever buy almost everything in those stores is beyond me. You must be color blind and have no taste at all to buy some of that stuff. It actually took me a while just to find a solid, neutral color couch. Why is that so hard??

Last night I went out with some of my new friends in Greenville. We started at a restaurant/bar called “O”. We’re sitting at the bar (which is on the second floor) and up from the first floor (the restaurant part) walks George Clooney and his entourage. Apparently Clooney is in town for a couple months making a movie. Among his entourage was Grant Heslov (who I always remember as being the camera guy from True Lies). The all gathered around the corner of the bar about 2 meters from us. It was pretty cool for about 5 minutes until we realized that all the waitresses had flocked over to that end of the bar and we could no longer get a drink. Beer is more important than George Clooney so we left.

We ended up hitting a couple more bars before winding down the night at a small Dutch-themed bar (at least that’s what I was told – the extent of the “Dutch theme” that I saw were some wooden clogs with cleats screwed in them behind the bar. There was also a Hungarian license plate on the wall. Well, I guess they’re both in Europe and maybe that’s close enough for them.

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