won't you be my neighbor?

do you know your neighbors?  should we institute "sleep overs" to get to know them?

read here 

great article.

sarah's been bloggin'

lots of things going on, and Sarah's been keeping the web up to date on all the news that's fit to print.  go visit her photo update at sardineink.blogspot.com

14 days on the ground

things have been coming together in the past few days here in partly sunny California.  

our POD was delivered and unloaded on Friday, so we now have an apartment full of boxes. eating cereal out of a real bowl never tasted so wonderful!  

on the same day, we purchased a car from a private party.  I have to say that dealing with car dealers was an ordeal.  we are now driving a silver 1996 Volvo 850 Turbo Wagon with 127k miles.  it needs a little bit of work, but for the price we got it at, we can afford to do a few things to keep it running.  once we get those things fixed, my hope is to drive to the coast to watch the sunset, or at least drive up and down it a few times.

we're getting to know our neighbors, for better and worse.  it seems that the walls and ceilings are paper thin, so we're having to adjust to living with shared surfaces, a bit of an adjustment after 3 years in a free-standing home.  one of our neighbors is a couple with a baby boy.  the other day we were loading up the car and heard bluegrass music being pumped out their front door.  then we heard a mandolin, which sounded like it was being played live.  we popped our heads in and discovered that the husband was playing along, entertaining his son.  hopefully we'll have a chance to jam before too long (though they're hitting the road for 5 weeks to head back east to visit family, so maybe it'll be in July when that happens).

last night we went to an Oakland Athletics game.  we watched from a pretty incredible vantage point in dead center from a luxury box.  they put the Detroit Tigers to bed in the bottom of the 9th.  I honestly have a little bit of a struggle cheering for any team in Oakland having grown up a Kansas City Royals and Chiefs fan.  I think as far as baseball, I won't have much trouble migrating my allegiance to the A's, though I'll probably still cheer for the Royals when they're in town (July 28-30 this year).  but I don't know if I'll ever become a Raiders fan, with the longstanding rivalry they've had with the Chiefs.  then again, being an NFL fan on the West Coast if pretty difficult if you go to church in the morning, missing the first game and barely making it home for the second one.

plenty more to write here, so I'll try to keep things updated.  be sure to check out Sarah's blog because she's starting to post there, too:  http://sardineink.blogspot.com