Strangely ILL

Shortly after moving to Michigan, I recorded a few thoughts differences that I'd noticed moving across the country.  They weren't terribly significant things, which is really the most significant thing about the list.   It's pretty much the same story with Illinois.  The country seems to be pretty homogeneous, at least from my sampling which now includes 3 of the 50 states. But here's what I've got so far:

Illinois likes to charge you for . . . well, whatever they think they can get away with.
- There is a $50 registration fee for kindergarten, which is only 2 1/2 hours a day.  If you want full day kindergarten, they have that, but it costs a few thousand dollars.
- They charge you to drive on their roads.  From our house, it costs a couple bucks worth of tolls to get into the city.  And a couple bucks more to get back out.  If you get a fancy electronic box to stick on your windshield, you don't have to stop to pay the tolls, and they are 50% cheaper.
- Property taxes are significantly higher here than they were in Midland.  (And people in Midland sure liked to complain about those.)  Of course, I don't own any property here, so this doesn't have a large direct effect on me.
- We haven't gotten new license plates or drivers licenses yet, but when we do, I'm sure they won't hesitate to charge us.
- Oh! How could I leave this one to so late in the list: they charge you to take away garbage.  Sure, you might say that every city does this, but in St. Charles, you have to buy their garbage bags, or but tags to put on your bags for them to take it away.  I suppose the upside to all this is that if we don't drive, or create garbage, we can save money!

It gets dark really early here
We only moved a few hundred miles west, but we went from the western edge of the Eastern time zone, to the eastern edge of the central time zone.  The net result is that sunset is about 45 minutes earlier than it used to be.  Today, that difference happened to be exactly 45 minutes, as it turns out.  Official sunset time in St. Charles today was 6:32 pm.  And we just barely hit the equinox.  And we haven't come off daylight savings time yet.  By Halloween, sunset will be at 5:48, and by Thanksgiving it will be at 4:24!  That's about where it bottoms out, which, is a good thing, because otherwise I'd go crazy.  Twilight will be before 5pm, so I'll be driving home from work in the middle of the night.  The other side of this is, of course, that the sun comes up that much earlier.  But that still doesn't motivate me to get out of bed.