Archive for August, 2008:
Trading Up – part 3
I know that I have no excuse. I grew up in Oak Ridge, a small town outside of Knoxville in the Appalachian mountains. I like to claim that the town is why I still don’t speak Tennessee. To my credit, Oak Ridge is the ‘city of scientists’. It’s the town that ‘built the bomb’ (along with its sister city Los Alamos, but that’s something we Oak Ridgers only seem to recognize because we must.) Oak Ridge (along with its sister city Los Alamos) has the distinction of having the highest number of PhDs per capita anywhere in the U.S. One of those is my father. My mother holds a JD and firm grip on atheism. So you can see that I was doomed to geekdom right from the start.
I contend that this is why I don’t speak Tennessee. We spoke a different language in my house growing up. My mother loves to tell the story about the neighbor who was upset that she had no fillings in her front teeth. (This was back in the days before the gold-capped front tooth was cool.) My mother told the neighbor lady that she was happy for her and was shocked when the neighbor demanded ‘why? I mean I can’t fill a thing!’ (If you didn’t get it, read it out loud.)
Trading Up – part 2
When we moved in, we were quite pleased that we had gotten our upgrade – more land and a desperate need for more furniture. We were happy. What I didn’t realize was that the land and the house was the very least of the trade-up.
Trading Up – part 1
Wagons East!
If you could see the U.S. from space, I am convinced there would be a visible line of cars heading from California back east – particularly to Nashville. I can imagine a lot of heads nodding as you read this. Yes, we moved to Nashville from San Diego last month. Our neighbor just came from California. My sister brought her kids out after ten years in Riverside. It’s the reverse of the Wagon trains of the eighteen hundreds.
I’m not the first to get this grand idea that somewhere-in-the-South would be a better place for a family than Los Angeles. I have become equally certain that I’m not the first Angeleno to hop online and start looking at Real Estate. And I know I’m not the only one who was glued to my computer until three a.m., rating homes and finding better deals like it was the latest Mario game I had to beat.
