You Give Love a Bad (Dot) Name

Oddly, hunting for a house and buying one is a bit time consuming.

All in all, I looked at about a dozen homes before deciding on one. It's a 105 year old Queen Anne, a couple blocks from the river. I moved in a month or so ago and I'm still not completely settled in. It's about 2200 finished square feet, technically 4 bedrooms 1.75 baths (but one bedroom is set up as a laundry room and I'm using another as an office). There's also a great third floor/attic that's finishable (and big enough that I could probably add a loft to it), and a 450 square foot 1 bedroom/1 bathroom "mother-in-law suite" over the "carriage house", which I'm renting to a ND divinity student. On one side of the house is the neighborhood association building. On the other side — a pair of nuns. Across…  a street that leads straight down to the river.  Behind, the 2 car "carriage house", and an alley, and a couple of houses that are currently being restored by the neighborhood association. So overall a pretty quiet location, if you ignore that the street is a fairly busy one and the hospital's less than a mile away. Big yard for being in such an old section of town. I've been here almost a month now. Enjoying it thus far. We'll see how it goes

And now, back to the regularly scheduled neglect of blog.

An interesting tidbit of information: If you create a cartogram of the United States, by county, based on the number of voters in the 2008 presidential election, and then shade each county red/blue based on the percentage of mccain/obama votes, it comes out looking strangely beautiful, like a purple bird in flight.

At the risk of sounding overdramatic, after 7 years in chains, hope now flies — on purple wings.

to the bastard who celebrated Independence Day by going around and doing this: