I'm also a fan of, like, the National Cancer Institute, Yellowstone National Park, interstate highways, and the FBI.

I'll have you know that research concerning the sexual habits of tree frogs is vital to our country's interstate highways. Not to mention the FBI.

No question, the Bay Area is horrifically expensive.

It is horrifically expensive because people want to live there. See also: NYC. If it's what you want, you want it badly enough to be poor.

Hey, Aurelia, I was just thinking about you Friday! My 11-year-old is fascinated by stage lighting now. I was telling him about footlights and then I wondered -whatever happened to footlights, and when did they go out? When I was doing amateur theater as a teenager, we still used them.

I would love to do that, but I think it would push me from "eats a lot of bologna" poor to "crazy crippled chick in a box" poor. I'm not so sure I can stay here though for life. Could I move my box close to y'all?

Except for the urban Northeast -- Boston area, suburbs (but not city) of New York, Baltimore area, okay maybe Philadelphia area although I have spent exactly no time there -- the Bay Area is the only place in the US I can really imagine myself living. Like, Arizona is pretty, but it's a different galaxy from anything I know.

(I don't think I could handle New York. Once, I drove from DC to Brooklyn -- across Manhattan -- and then on to Boston in one long moving day, and the only thing that freaked me out about that day was driving and driving and driving out of Brooklyn, and never getting out.)

(Okay, we did get out eventually, but the tightly-spaced, no-trees, mashed-together-falling-apart 3-story buildings made it feel like I was going in circles.)

Of course, it helps that I was introduced to the Bay Area by a Massachusetts expatriate, and 90% of the people I know who live there are immigrants to there. They want to live there, you know? And don't just live there because they haven't thought about living someplace else.

The Texas GOP Party Platform is an amazing document.

Dude, the Republicans here won't even consider the bill offering life without parole as an option for punishing criminals (this bill is by a Dem, incidentally). That's right; the state with the highest death penalty rate in the US (and one of the highest in the world) doesn't allow juries to consider life without parole as an option for punishment of criminals. It's kill 'em or let 'em move in next door to your daughter when they get out.

One of the amazing thing about working with the TX Republicans up-close and personal is that so few of them are moderate. You'd think, with so many of them, statistics would hold that more than a tiny handful would be considered moderate Republicans, but the vast majority of them are from the more extreme side of the party, so extreme that it takes backroom dealings to merely, for instance, fund a program providing drugs to children with HIV.

Having written this, I'm struck by a sudden desire to change my online name.

Kansas City is a pretty nice place, and relatively cheap as well.

I'll have you know that research concerning the sexual habits of tree frogs is vital to our country's interstate highways.

Actually, that'd be a fairly easy connection to make. Environmental review, and all that. It might have to be an endangered tree frog, though.

Wow, Hayden, yours are weirder than ours...only just. ( Which is partially why I look at ads for other places and think "Three meals is just a guideline, right?")

It might have to be an endangered tree frog, though.

Living on an interstate sounds like a pretty endangering lifestyle to me.