Blizzard of Oz

That's what they're calling the storm we had yesterday and the day before. I've also heard "Snowmaggedon." They closed down the interstate highway all the way across Missouri because of whiteout conditions. It was incredibly windy, cold and snowy all at once. I stayed inside, with a cat lapwarmer.

This morning I went out to see if there was a newspaper. Nope.

There also wasn't a sidewalk or a set of steps down to the street. We had around 12 inches (about 30 cm) of snow. Not much for some parts of the country--that's what I found on my rental car last Thursday morning in Massachusetts--but a lot for here. As I write this I can hear a car spinning its wheels in the effort to get up the hill. As most have done all day, it will have to slide backwards to the bottom of the hill and try another way.

Did I mention those high winds? The snow was blown around in beautiful patterns.

This is in the back of my house, after some of the snow has begun to melt--not sure how, as it's tremendously cold, but the icicles don't lie.

So now we have a sunny day, and a small puffy-headed alien in the backyard. Happens to everyone.

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!

Why I skipped blogging in July, or my big news

I've been a little busy.

Read to the end to find out why this enigmatic photo is here.

Since I last wrote, I've traveled to North Carolina, Wisconsin, Missouri and California. Only the last two of these trips were for storytelling. In Missouri, I did six performances in two days for the Daniel Boone Regional Library, always a good time. I didn't have any pie, but I did have excellent ice cream from Sparky's in Columbia. They make it right there. Yum.

This last weekend was the National Storytelling Conference in LA. The conference is like a happy family reunion. Nobody says, "Storyteller? You mean you read books to children" or "Storytelling? You can make a living at that?" There are workshops on the art and craft of storytelling, keynotes to inspire us, and endless conversations at meals, in the lobby and in the pool. Oh, and dancing. There's always dancing.

I was fortunate that my name was drawn for a Fringe performance, at which I told "Queen Berta and King Pippin" at 9:45 p.m. (to my central time zone body it felt like 11:45 p.m., and I'm not a night owl). I got a good response to it and it felt pretty solid. Look for news on whether the video and audio recordings I attempted came out or not.

But there's more. The big news is that I'll be moving. I've sold my house (gulp!) and will move to Kansas City, KS with my beau. We decided to do this so he wouldn't have to drive an hour each way to work. The house we found (pictured above), if all the inspections and the appraisal go well, is only a 30-minute drive for him. I was signing and faxing the contract from the hotel in LA, a surreal experience.

I don't have much storytelling work in August, so I'll be sorting, tossing, packing and moving. Wish me luck!

P.S. The yard sale will probably be on August 14.