I’m continuing to settle in to the new place. Oddly, it’s all the little adjustments that are harder to make than the huge one of having moved halfway across the country to a place I’ve only visited once. I feel quite at home already, but there are a lot of little things to get used to.

For one thing, the time zone. Most of the time, I don’t notice the difference. It helped that when I got here, I was utterly exhausted and slept late, so I was instantly on the new time. Where I have to adjust is with TV programming. My routine was always to eat dinner while watching the national news at 5:30, then the local news came on at 6. Here, the local news still comes on at 6, but the national news is at 6:30. I find myself wanting to eat dinner at 5:30, even though that’s 4:30 in the old time. There’s not a lot of radio here, so I’ve been streaming the Dallas classical station, and I have to mentally adjust for the various programs. They play a “march of the day” at 7:35 a.m., Dallas time, and I tried to be making or even eating breakfast by then, but here it comes on at 8:35, so I should be done with breakfast when it comes on. My signal to finish breakfast was the “road rage remedy” at 8:20, but that’s 9:20 here. I don’t watch a lot of prime-time TV, but that would also be an issue with everything on an hour later.

I’m still getting used to parallel parking. It helps that I learned how to do that in a Bronco and practiced in a 1981 Impala. That makes doing it in a Subaru Forester with a backup camera fairly easy, but I still haven’t managed to do it smoothly in one move without a lot of backing, inching forward, and adjusting. I really hope I don’t have to take a driving test to get my Virginia drivers license.

I’m a lot farther north than I used to live, so the days are longer here at this time of year. The sunset seems to be close to the same time as it was back in Texas, but the sun comes up a lot earlier. I used to say I preferred Standard time over Daylight Saving time, but if it were Standard time now, the sun would be up before 5 a.m. My bedroom window faces west, and I have blinds and lined curtains, and still it’s hard to sleep past 6 a.m. I may just have to give in and go to bed earlier and get up when the sun wakes me.

Then there are all the little things about being in a new house — where are the light switches, and which one turns on which light? Where did I put that thing when I unpacked it? This place is configured so differently from my old home that there was no way to just put things where they used to go. I have to find different places to put everything.

I’ll also have to get used to Target being a 15-minute drive away rather than being in walking distance. The Target is actually in the next town over. It’s closer than the nearest Target used to be before they built the one on the edge of my neighborhood, and it’s a much more pleasant drive, but now it has to be a planned expedition rather than a quick run down the street to grab something. Ditto with Home Depot. On the other hand, there are a ton of great restaurants and several little brewpubs, including a cider brewery, within walking distance here.

I’m gradually learning to find my way around. I got a bit lost while running errands earlier in the week, since the streets twist and turn so much that it’s easy to get turned around. But I managed to get to where I needed to go between the compass in my car, the map on my car’s screen, and the road signs. It turned out I was on the loop around the city. In Texas, any loop around a city is a busy road with lots of businesses on it, and that was what I was expecting. Here, it truly is a bypass that goes way out into the country, so I didn’t have a good sense of where I was.

Doing laundry is kind of an adventure. This apartment has a space-age all-in-one unit. It works as a washer, then you hit a different control and it also dries the clothes. The previous tenant here said she had problems with it. I found the manual on the manufacturer’s website, and I had to have that open on my screen in order to figure out how to work it. It takes more than three hours to do a load, start to finish, and I can only do one load at a time (no throwing something in the washer while the previous load is in the dryer), so I’ll have to plan for laundry days. I’ve figured out some of the tricks already, so I may get used to it — probably at about the time I’m ready to buy and move into a house.

I’ve got my bedroom more or less set up the way I want it, with everything put away. The kitchen is almost there. I’ve managed to do actual cooking. Aside from getting the books properly shelved, the living room part of the living/dining/office room is the way I want it. I have the TV set up with the antenna and the streaming devices, and I have the chaise I use as a sofa with the side tables. I can sit and read or watch TV/movies. I also have my back porch set up. I need more plants, but the table and chairs are there, and I’ve even strung my lights. The office area is going to be the real challenge. I got rid of my big desk and will be using my laptop stand and some tables as a desk replacement, and since it’s not in a separate room that’s supposed to be a bedroom, I don’t have a closet for office stuff, so I’ll have to figure out where to put some things.

I’m trying to get back into my regular working routine. I’ve been working on writing stuff in the morning and unpacking in the afternoon and evening. I still have a lot of admin stuff to deal with around the move. There are so many things I need to update with my new address, and I need to get a local drivers license and register my car, but the DMV website has been down.