My hood

One thing I'll really miss when I move is walking around my current neighborhood. Within a couple miles of our apartment there are parks and bike trails and elementary schools and a creek (okay, it's more of an irrigation/drainage canal, but it runs through the woods and is pretty when it's full of water) and some really nice houses. In the past year or so I've become a complete real estate whore, so walking through these neighborhoods is endlessly fascinating to me. Many people would probably find it boring - there are no funky little shops (any sort of shops, really) or restaurants or anything like that. There's a swimming and tennis club, but that's about it. In fact, I might have once assumed I'd find it boring. But I don't, at all. I love that it's not busy, and it's quiet, and there are all of these trees and big yards and interesting architecture. (A lot of Frank Lloyd Wright's disciples built homes around here, it seems.)

The street names also entertain me, and I'd love to know who came up with them. There are interesting pockets of theme going on - national parks (Grand Canyon, Yellowstone), Civil War (Sumter, Antietam, Gettysburg, Appomattox). The most baffling one to me is the nautical theme - Island, Jetty, Landfall, Driftwood, Nautilus, Masthead, Offshore, Frigate, Eddy. We're not exactly the seashore over here on the West side.

Anyway, my new neighborhood has more of a "condo sprawl" flavor. The downtown area is painfully cute, and not too far away - but I don't think it'll exactly feel like my neighborhood. (Though the local Mom & Pop grocery store already won my heart by carrying SnapeaCrisps, which are the most addicting and delicious things on the face of the earth and I'd only previously found them at Trader Joe's.) There is a nice park (with a lake and a water slide) within a mile or so, which I look forward to checking out. Speaking of which, closing is twenty days away. Holy crap. I still have to decide if and what I'm going to paint, and I recently got a nice set of Mission style dining room chairs at St. Vinnie's for $12 each but I don't really have a matching table, and I need bookshelves and a new bed and a million other things I may or may not actually buy, and oh my God I'm so glad our current lease isn't up until the end of July.