What I Will and Will Not Miss About Dayton

Today is my last day of work in D-town, and now that my 2 1/2 year tenure in THE birthplace of aviation is coming to an end, I have given some thought to what I'll miss about Dayton and what I won't miss.

What I will miss:

1. My friends here. Lemme holla at ya.
2. Walking to work.
3. 30 in8 and "Hamburger Helper" Ashcraft puking all over my front stairs. I guess I can start up 30 in 8 West this year, pending Jester's approval of course. (For those of you unfamiliar with 30 in 8, here is a link explaining the rules.)
4. Movie Night (even though we haven't had one in a while and we didn't get a chance to watch all three Sleepaway Camps, along with the production footage from the unfinished fourth, Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor. Yes, I do own said footage.).
5. Kramer's. 40s and some of the best in the world, period.
6. Seeing babies in bars. Case in point, Jamie and Amy brought AC to Kramer's last night, put a hood on him, gave him a fake, and let him down his own quart of Bud Light. In a related note, AC's Jheri curl mullet is not coming in nearly as nicely as I would have hoped.
7. My bowling league. Except for about five or six people in the league, we all sucked. Thus, it was fun.
8. The annual ritual of seeing Ken Griffey, Jr. succumb to a season-ending injury sometime each April or May.
9. Dirty Dayton Bar Crawl.

What I won't miss:

1. The drivers. As a whole, drivers in southwestern Ohio might be the worst in the world. Whether it's driving the speed limit in the fast lane (and failing to move to the right when you come up behind them), accelerating out of stop lights with the urgency of a dying sloth, parking in the right lane when it's a no parking zone, coming to a complete stop while merging onto the highway, slowing down or coming to a complete stop at intersections where there is no stop sign, never using turn signals, or not driving more than 25 miles an hour at the slightest hint of precipitation, I have never encountered a larger concentration of shitty drivers.
2. OSU fans. Obxnoxious, annoying, ignorant, and generally classless is unfortunately the rule and not the exception (luckily, most of my OSU alum friends are the exception).
3. Fecal phantoms. I pray that it's a southwestern Ohio thing.
4. Bengals fans. See #2.
5. The fact that there will be no buckeye nuts (which are poisonous) for my dog to attempt to eat, thus forcing Jester and me to make Harley swallow hydrogen peroxide in order to induce vomiting, thus meaning that Harley will puke all over the carpet (and I do mean all over) a week before we have to move out of our apartment.
6. The fact that the sun disappears from October to April.
7. The redneck factor. Dayton is only an hour north of Kentucky, which you will realize once you make a trip to the Super Wal-Mart and see someone using food stamps to buy 10 bags of potato chips, 5 Whatchamacallits, a 2-pound bag of Twizzlers, a case of Jolt, 3 tins of Skoal, and a box of Franzia White Grenache, rather than, oh say, bread, milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, etc.
8. Residing in a city where the mayor wants to fine people for swearing in public. Are you fucking kidding me?
9. People who think it's completely cool to have a "Tell Your Girlfriend She Talks In Her Sleep" bumper sticker on their car. I actually saw this one on my way to work today. It was on a late model Jeep Cherokee, and not the 1988 Dodge Daytona that you might have guessed.