Good News

I had part 1 of my 6 month review this morning - including the written part that goes in my file - and it was glowing. That's nice. I have meetings tomorrow to do some further planning for my future, including (I hope) taking over Classics for outreach and setting up a Collection Development internship.

There was also a meeting at Dillo's day care last night in which it was announced that they do have a property to move the center to this summer when the Feds kick them out, and it was previously a day care so it will need minimal work, and it is located very close to mr. flea's work, and it has a good playground and a big soccer field. AND they will keep kids until 4.5 (previously they were saying only until 3). So it looks like we won't have to find a new daycare for Dillo at all; he will just move with his existing class and teachers in the summer (and probably move up to the oldest group, once he turns 3). It will be more expensive than it is now, but since right now it is, to my Durham-trained standards, incredibly cheap, that's not a big worry.

North and South

If things go as planned, we could be living in Athens for a major chunk of time. I mean, we bought a house; in some ways it would be really bad if we moved before 5-8 years are up. In 5 years Casper will be 10 and Dillo will be 7, and they'll have lived their entire lives in the South.

Growing up, mostly in New England, the South was a foreign country to me, and I was as guilty as anyone of stereotyping Southerners. The mere existence of Jesse Helms didn't exactly help matters. Now I've lived here coming up on 7 years and it's still not home to me, though I have learned a lot. Athens is a lot more Southern than Durham, so I've got new learning to do. But home to me is still a place with actual winter, and wood stoves, and oil heat, and Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans.

And, of course, Southerners stereotype Northerners, too. This was a cheesy little piece of cliche in the student paper this am (about a baseball player who spent the summer in Cape Cod):

"And few things will make a person tougher than surviving a summer of Northern hospitality.

"The people are a lot more friendly in the South, I will say that," Poythress said with a laugh. "The food was a little different and stuff like that, but I was around baseball players every second of the day so it was fine."

For Poythress, it also didn't help that the North couldn't find any sweet tea, either.

"The very first time I asked for sweet tea, I knew they wouldn't have it, somebody just looked at me like I was crazy and said, 'We have sugar' and I said 'That's fine,'" he said."

I wonder if I'll be like my grandparents, who moved to Cincinnati in 1946, but vacationed on Cape Cod the whole time, and as soon as my grandfather retired in the mid 1970s moved back to the Cape for good. I also wonder if my kids will be like my father, who moved to Cincinnati as an infant, left after medical school, but eventually moved back.

What about you? Is where you were raised still "home"?