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29 October 2013

My Thoughts on Pennsylvania

After being here in Pennsylvania for 4 months now I thought I would write down some thoughts about it.  Let me start with some things that I really like about PA.  The green trees and glorious rain during the Summer months by far exceeded my expectations.  It was wonderful.  I loved every moment of it.
Everyone always talks about that the trees turning colors for the Fall in the East is absolutely gorgeous. Well, in my opinion it was just okay.  I would say that any canyon in Utah has a far prettier array of trees through the Fall.  Half of the trees here turned colors and then lost most of their leaves in the short time frame of about a week.  And now for the entire rest of Fall there are still trees slowly changing colors, but with all of the trees that are dead there really isn't much of a great grandeur about it.  I wondered that maybe it wasn't a good Fall this year, but after hearing a few people remark at how beautiful Fall has been I am guessing that this is pretty typical.

Enough about seasons, I thought I would share with you the biggest reason that I HATE living in Pennsylvania.  And no, I am not going to tell you its the fast windy roads that make you lose your lunch or the incredibly slow freeway speeds.  Those come in at a close second, but the biggest thing that I dislike about Pennsylvania is all of the smoking that happens.  It is the reason that I hate going outside.  Whenever going to Walmart for groceries (there are no close grocery stores at all and people thought that Grantsville was far from stores) I ALWAYS am accosted by cigarette smoke.  People always light up when walking to and from the store and will sit in their car to have a smoke.  The front entrance of Walmart reeks of cigarette smoke and I feel like I get lung cancer every time I go buy groceries.

I wondered if Pennsylvania was high on the list of states that smoked so I looked it up and here is what I found.

Pennsylvania ranks in at 33rd (1 being the least smokers) with 22.4% smokers.  So they aren't the worst smoking state, I can't even imagine living in a state worse than PA!  I would die.  I would like to state that Utah has the least smokers at 11.8%.  No surprise there.  California is the next best state with 13.7% smokers.  It kind of surprised me that California was so good.  I never felt accosted by smoking growing up, but guess I kind of figured that most states were like CA.  Well, to have only ever lived in states where smoking is much lower Pennsylvania seems terrible.

On a side note, Pennsylvania's tax on cigarettes isn't terribly high at $1.60/pack compared to New York who taxes $4.35/pack (they have the highest tax).  We heard that people in New York often drive just south of their border into Pennsylvania to buy their cigarettes.  Enough about that.


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