Closing Out August with a Whimper

I'm testing this busy background picture to see if it works well with reading.

Work(s) have pretty much consumed all of my free time recently, and if I wasn't at work(s) then I was with Corrie picking out furniture for our new apartment, checking it's viability in Corrie's 3D computer model, changing our minds, and doing it all over again.

Today I watched Hawai'i lose a close game to Japan in the Little League World Series Championship Game. The Hawai'ian team was from the same small community outside of Honolulu as the 2008 LLWS Champion team. It was said that the chance of the same small community reaching the finals of the LLWS twice in three years was fifty-million-to-one.

Fifty-million-to-one.

The responses of folks when we tell them where we're moving to are rather shocking to me when one takes into account the considerable girth that is the state of Texas. Some people drive an hour on a Saturday morning just to get some award-winning bar-be-que for golly's sake. Our new apartment is less than ten miles away. Most responses have been of the "that's so far!" kind. Maybe since we already live in northern Austin, and are moving more north, means that we're extra far--from the downtown bar scene. Boo-hoo.

For perspective's sake, it was fourteen miles from our apartment in northern Brooklyn to Yankee Stadium in the south Bronx. Those are places that are in technically the same city, and if you moved from BK to the BX, people would consider it "far". Of course seven million of those people are on foot. Fourteen miles was about the same distance from our house on Palm Street in San Luis Obispo to Morro Bay, whereas the distance from that house to Shell Beach was just over ten miles, and in both of those places folks would consider that move "far". Strangely enough, fourteen miles is just over the distance from my brother's house in Citrus Heights to downtown Sacramento.

I've almost convinced myself that it is "far". I think the combination of driving across the county multiple times, making long drives regularly in earlier years, and more recently, making long bicycle rides has changed my perspective on proximity. For a place that prides itself on "big-ness", technically "Texas-Sized", I was flabbergasted...nine little miles?