More Thoughts on Moving Home

There are so many things I love about my hometown. I had forgotten a lot of the individual things over the last nine years I had been living elsewhere, but I needed only to sit on my back porch my first night there to remember many of them. It was dark; darker than the city I had been living in; and I could see so many more stars in the sky. I could actually find more constellations than just the Big Dipper and Orion. The semi-rural smell of the air. The lack of traffic noise. And the grand finale... the sound of a train running along the nearby tracks!

I've missed you, my old friend. There truly is no place like home.

There's No Place Like Home - July Highlights

The big event in July for our family wasn't the Stadium of Fire (yes, I did pay for and endure the torture that is the combination of the right-wing schtick of Glenn Beck and the whiney, breathy, pre-pubescent, bubblegum-pop stylings of the Jonas Brothers for my little girls -- I AM a good mom, damn it!)

No, the really big event in July was a move back to my hometown... not just my hometown, but my childhood neighborhood. It's a three-bedroom with a huge utility/laundry room and a cellar for storing all my sentimental crap. It's huge compared to the place where we had been living the past 18 months. It's just blocks away from my parents and older two children. And the landlord completely gutted and remodeled it just before we moved in. Beautiful!

We are no longer forced to hide our cats from a landlord. This is a cat-friendly home. We no longer have to hide the fact that we are smokers. The landlord is a smoker too, and has no qualms about our smoking on the patio. In other words, the place is about as close to perfect as it gets. Except for the spiders... lots of creepy spiders... ewwww.