b d babble: And to Think....We Live Here!

****************************************************************************

Love Where You Live, or MOVE!

Parking Lot of Porters Restaurant, Medford, Oregon

I have been fortunate over the years to live in some truly AWESOME locales. I have lived in five states thus far, all of which border water. And by water I mean OCEAN! Yes I have lived hours from the ocean, much like I do now due to terrain and accessible roads. After all, it is roughly three hours by car from my home now to the Pacific. But a crow (or bald eagle) could probably get there in an hour or so. I do love the ocean. But that is not the purpose of this writing. Tonight it is about loving where you live regardless of being land locked or stranded on an island.

Having lived in five beautiful states, some more so than others, I have been blessed with cool stuff to do. From the metropolitan cities of Atlanta, GA and Portland, OR to the small towns of Albany, OR (not pronounced Allbenny) population 32,000 at the time, I have found you sometimes just have to dig to find why you like living there.

Over the years I have heard people say "well where I come from" and "back home we always..." You can finish the sentence. I have most likely even said some variation of these myself. My only hope is that I said it more as let me share something with you vs. coming off as I hate it here and some place else is so much better. It is the later that irks me if you will. We have all made decisions in our lives about where we will live and the kind of work we will do. In college there were some careers I thought would be great, but I didn't like the idea of living in _____________. You fill in the blank. I am going to leave it open as not to "offend" someone....HA. Go ahead, put Topeka, KS in the blank. I can't imagine offending anyone there.

Okay I digress. The point is when looking at careers I also looked at where do I wanted to live. Perhaps I would be farther into some corporate career by now if I had chosen otherwise, though I doubt it. I gotta like where I live more than I gotta love what I am doing. Perhaps that is why some of my funnest and most successful jobs have been within two miles of my home.

Tonight, after an enjoyable happy hour/retirement party for one of my wife's coworkers I got to experience one of the many reasons I love where I live. Heading West out of Medford to our home in the really small town of Jacksonville, population 2900ish, I had to do a U-turn and pull over for the following;