A reflection on living in Kansas

As our house becomes increasingly empty and the date of departure gets closer, I have been thinking of all the things I will and won't miss about living here.

Things I will miss:
1. Our wonderful friends! I know I'm not posting a picture of all the wonderful friends that we have, but I don't have that many pictures and frankly I kind of suck at taking pictures at parties. :}



2. Beautiful sunsets
3. An easy way of life.
4. Teaching. (would post a picture, but I don't want to hear the flack for posting a picture of my students on my blog.)
5. Getting from one end of town to the next in less then 10 minutes.
6. Lack of traffic.
7. Hobby Lobby.
8. Lovely scenery.



9. School spirit, even though I don't completely understand it.
10. Harry's restaurant.
11. Buffalo.


12. Snow.


13. Purple People. You can't really see all of them, but every football game day we would have massive groups of people wearing purple.


Things I won't miss:
1. Bugs!
2. Stupid drivers. For example: Idiots stopping on freeway on ramps. How do you expect to "merge" on a freeway going 70 mph when you've stopped! Morons.
Today I saw TWO cars driving down the WRONG side of the road. There's some construction and they were driving on the newly paved road. Don't think that there wasn't lines painted in yet, because there was. These people just were too dumb to remember that the yellow line going on your left. After all, we're not British!
3. Giant blood sucking mosquitoes!

4. Stupid college students who litter on my lawn.
5. Bugs.
6. Stupid college students who hit my truck!
7. Bugs.

8. Stupid college students who are too cheap to pay the 150 bucks for a parking ticket, and then crowd our street with their cars and make it easy for the stupid college student to hit my truck!
9. Bugs
10. The humidity! No man/woman should have to sweat this much! Especially when all you do is step outside. Not fair.
11. Bugs.
12. Getting woken up by college students practically fornicating on the side of your house and lots of drunken mayhem.
13. Bugs.
14. Lack of good restaurants. (Sad when so many people get very excited when the Olive Garden came to town.) (sorry if you're one of those people who got excited.)
15. Snow/Ice Storm













16. Tornadoes.




I'm sure I'm missing many wonderful things to list and many not so wonderful things, but every place has it's good and it's bad. I'm by no means saying that California is the best place to live. Sometimes I worry that it's the right choice because there are many things that I don't like about California. For example, the keeping up with the Joanses aspect of living in Orange County. I like driving my 10 year old pick up truck around town and feeling like I fit in, not that I drive a heap of rusting car parts. (I like my truck and it does a great job at it's job.) (Probably just cursed it! It's going to break now...)

I'm sure I'll have ample opportunities to complain about the sunshine and the beach and the perfect weather. :)

All in all, we've really enjoyed living here and our friends made it so special. Thank you to everyone that we've become friends with and that we will continue to make friends with.