I've moved!

After 17 years of living in Lawrence (this time, that is--I lived there twice before, once for two years, once for one year), I've moved. Now I live in Kansas City, Kansas. Here's the house: It was built in 1920 and has nice high ceilings, pretty woodwork, and as of last week, a brand new roof. Soon we'll get the gutters on, too. I'm not yet willing to show you pictures of the inside--there are still lots of boxes to unpack and things to put away.

For those of you not from around here, there are two Kansas Cities, one in Kansas and one in Missouri. They're pressed up against each other, right at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers. KCK is the smaller city, with about 140,000 people. The entire Kansas City metropolitan area, both in Kansas and Missouri, has about 2 million people.

We moved to Strawberry Hill, a friendly neighborhood that used to be mostly Croatian and Slovenian and is now becoming Hispanic. Half a block from our house is a barbecue place run by an African-American family, up the hill is a taco stand, around the block is a sausage company, a few streets away is a Central American restaurant. The signs in our grocery store are in English and Spanish, and you can get every kind of hot pepper and edible cactus there. The other night, I got home too late from performances in Salina to go to Slovenefest at Holy Family Church. I can see the church from my office window:

Another church is visible from the other window, if I'm standing up and looking northeast:

When I look a little southeast, over our neighbor's roof, I can see the KCMO skyline:

This move is the big reason I haven't written a blog post in over a month. Now I'd better get back to unpacking. I'll write more posts when my office is better organized, I promise!