Pride of the Prairie

Some of you have heard about this offline already, but I want to make a general announcement before anyone starts hearing rumors.

Kelly and I really enjoy living in Somerville. But at the same time, we know that it's getting harder and harder to find affordable housing in the Boston area. We want to have kids in a few years, and we'll need to be someplace with decent schools and room to play outdoors. We'll never be able to afford a real house in a good school district without subjecting ourselves to long commutes and never having any family time. So, it's become pretty obvious that our days in Boston are numbered and a while ago we started talking about where we might want to live in the future.

I thought we'd stick around for a few more years, particularly since we just bought a condo and I've got a new job and Kelly was planning to start grad school. However, a few weeks ago I read an article in the New York Times about midwestern communities that are offering free land to people who move there and build a house. Sometimes you just have a realization that the time to act is now and if you don't do it you'll regret it for the rest of your life. So, we're moving to Atwood, Kansas at the beginning of June. Our lot looks a bit like this one, but with more trees. We're really excited about building our own place. It's going to take a little while, but we have lots of friends and relatives who know about building who've been helping us with the plans. I even talked Kelly into giving me space for a server room. I was a little nervous about being an interfaith lesbian couple in Kansas, but Kelly pointed out that we'll just get mistaken for sisters a lot until people get to know us. I do need to figure out how to get bagels by mail-order, but I have a few months to work on that. We're going to have a ton of space for a vegetable garden.

There aren't a whole lot of tech jobs in rural Kansas, but I'm going to do some consulting work for a company in Boston and Kelly's already found a job at a high school. They have high schools everywhere, so she just has to take another certification exam and she'll be all set. With housing so much cheaper, our expenses will be a lot lower.

We're going to miss all of our friends in Boston, but most everyone is on LJ so we can still keep in touch like that. And once we've got our new place built, I'm hoping we can talk some of you into visiting. Or you can wave at us as you fly over en route to California or something.

A life less orange and fluffy

In the course of going to catch up on someone else's LJ, I happened to look at the bio on my info page. Then I had to edit it to reduce the number of cats. It's been a month since we lost M. Lechat. Maura seems to be doing okay as an only cat, but we can't really tell for sure. Most of the time she likes to hang out with Kelly and pretends I don't exist. Every now and again, she wants a lot of attention. Kelly thinks she's bored. We've talked about getting another cat, but neither of us really wants another cat and we can't tell if Maura really wants one either. So we're going to wait and see. Besides, after 4 years of arguing about what we'll name our future children (initially it was a serious debate, now it's kind of a sport) any pet we adopted would probably wind up with a really awful name.